The Visit
by BirdAntlers
Summary: Thirty-three years have passed since Jack arrived in the future, and the more that go by, the more things are beginning to feel off. Jack visits someone who he thinks may be able to help, but a brain scan, a vision, and a mare begin to unravel truths that hurt far more than anything Jack could have ever anticipated from a simple visit.
1. The Fourth Floor

It was raining bullets. Saturated wind came slashing down the faces of buildings as thunder bounced off the concrete walls, and the glare of neon was everywhere around them. It reflected off puddles and plated windows in bright, foreign tongues, giving the dark strip an eerie, artificial glow. Despite the lack of people, the roadway felt cramped and narrow, and the sky was near invisible above. The rain didn't help, filling the air like a basin to drown something in. The sound was incredible.

One lone soul was out in the soup, looking out on the street from a dark alleyway. Cold and soaked to the bone, Jack sat hunched over on his motorcycle and stared across the way, pelted by wind and rain and exhausted by the chaos of the city. It was four in the morning.

Jack choked back a yawn and rubbed his eyes, trying to keep rain from running into them. He hadn't slept the night before, either. Really, he couldn't remember the last time he had slept longer than a few hours at a time. His head nodded, and he crossed his arms over the handlebars and rested it there for a moment, continuing to stare through the downpour at his target against the harsh fluorescent light.

It was no remarkable structure; a boarded up brick building that was dwarfed by a leviathan black steel building that had been constructed directly above it. Massive support beams rose up the sides of the brick like the roots of a huge, parasitic tree; one of the newer high rises that made up part of the upper levels of the city, and dwarfed those below it. This building sat at ground level; the lowest.

A few letters hung on the top of the building's façade, rusted and scattered where nearly all of them had fallen off, leaving only 'O LO Y AL' in its place. Jack cocked his head to the side and raised an eyebrow, wondering passively what it may have said before.

This target may have been nothing spectacular, but he kept his vision trained on it nonetheless. Doubt swirled in his stomach, fogged by exhaustion, but he shook it off. There had been certain matters weighing on him for long enough, and he hadn't seen anybody come or go from the building in the four hours he had been sitting there. At least that was somewhat of a comfort. He shifted, resting the side of his head against his arms. The rain was droning static, and his eyes fell shut on their own as soon as there was a break in Jack's racing mind.

A cold raindrop slithered down his back and he sat up straight, shivering. He couldn't sleep now.

Jack brushed the hair out of his eyes and scanned the street again, frowning when it only fell back in front of his face, but movement suddenly caught his attention and he froze. Someone was walking down the sidewalk across the road. He squinted through the rain, the old fear of being recognized crawling up his spine. It was a squatty biped creature in a trenchcoat, that much was clear, but Jack couldn't make out much else than a vaguely reptilian appearance.

 _Don't look up,_ he silently willed it. _Don't go in that building._ Both of them would have serious regrets if it caught his eye, and he was in no mood for a confrontation, much less anything that could gain the attention of any higher authority. He tensed, risking a glance behind him as if scores of drones were going to pour out of the alley walls. Turning back to the street, he saw the creature turn and duck into a bar without a second glance. While holding the door, a clap of thunder ripped through the air and rattled windows up and down the street, and it turned in shock. Jack's heart jumped, but he also blinked incredulously. The creature had no eyes.

As he watched the door shut behind it, Jack groaned and rubbed his face, leaning forward again on the handlebars. He was getting worked up over nothing. Still, lingering worry and personal experience told him that the thing could still come storming out of the bar with a kangaroo court of bounty hunters at its back. But, as the seconds ticked by all the worry devolved into exasperation. He was being ridiculous.

Jack hunched forward and wiped water off the speedometer with his thumb, squinting through the rain at the digital clock. 4:23 AM. He had seven minutes.

Heaving a huge sigh, Jack begrudgingly stood, wincing at the pins and needles in his legs from sitting for so long. Dragging a tarp over the motorcycle, he took a wary step forward and looked from one end of the street to the other. Nothing.

Puddles splashed all over his legs as he ran from the alley, across the street, around the corner of the building, and right into a narrow walkway that cut between the bar and the building. The rain felt even more merciless now that he had been out in it, and he regretted bringing his beat-up coat. It had proven completely useless at keeping the rain out, but he had been colder without it. This didn't change the fact that he was soaked, and the garment weighed heavy on his shoulders with water.

As he slogged through the crawl space, the wall of the bar suddenly shrank away, and the walkway widened into a cavernous alcove. The rain was even more deafening in the chamber, and Jack jumped at a light that flicked on over the back door of the bar. He ducked around a dumpster and out of sight, but heard nothing; no door opening or slamming. _Motion-activated,_ he thought, trying to shake the jumpiness that had come over him since he had arrived in the city. The seconds ticked by and he cautiously edged around the dumpster, sweeping the wall of the other building until his eyes found the ladder.

As promised, the rickety thing hung bolted to the brickwork, rusty and precarious-looking. Jack couldn't honestly believe that anybody had climbed it in years, but he crossed the alcove nonetheless, steeling his judgement.

The rust bit his hands as he took the rungs and climbed. As he went further upward, the wind shifted, sending rain lashing against the side of his face instead of his back. He hadn't gotten too far when the light above the back door of the bar timed out, and Jack stopped short as the alcove was plunged into darkness. The wind howled around him and the ladder groaned and shuddered on its bearings. The sensation made his lungs seize up with panic, and he looked from side to side in the dark, remaining frozen in place as if the whole thing would come unbolted from the wall and send him spinning toward the pavement below. He risked a glance and squinted through the mess up toward the sky. Lightning flickered from somewhere above and revealed the silhouette of a fire escape, hanging barely twenty feet above his head like a wrought iron promised land.

The sight urged his arms back into movement, and he scrambled up the rest of the ladder, feeling his way up blindly or by lightning. When he finally did manage to clamber onto the fire escape, he nearly shook with relief, peering down the sheer wall into the gloom below.

The ground- or what he could assume was the ground- looked much farther away than four stories. He gulped, and managed to force himself to stand against the blustering wind, hanging onto the railing for dear life. The windblown rain tricked his eyes, creating false depth and making a dizzying effect on the downward view. He blinked hard- forcing himself to find his bearings and feeling the iron quake underfoot. He was stronger than rusted steel and a storm. Turning his back to the drop, he crept slowly over to the wall as the instructions– relayed to him from the other end of a payphone– returned to him.

 _Look for the window on the right side._ Sure enough, there it was, plastered in wooden planks. Jack looked closer, barely able to see the shape of the window. Remembering what had been told him, he jiggled on one of the boards. It didn't move, and Jack smirked. With both hands, he pried the board- and all the other boards- out of the window in one fluid movement. The cluster of planks was in fact, not a cluster at all, but a false door. The boards had all been nailed haphazardly to a wooden pallet and wedged into the window frame, giving the decrepit illusion to any happening glances from below.

Jack swung his legs over the rotted sill and cautiously angled himself into the building, turning to restore the pallet to its rightful place. At his feet was a makeshift welcome mat, covered in spidery permanent marker. The unease that had been coiled in his lungs skyrocketed. It had been decades since any Norwegian had passed his ears– be had barely been twenty when he had learned the ways of life dictated by ice and sea– but 'The _Slakter_ is In' wasn't the most reassuring phrase for him to be greeted with.

The smell of mildew was thick in the air, and underneath it the sharper, colder aroma of chemicals. He had landed himself in a dim room, empty except for a fallen ceiling panel and a few chairs against the far wall. There was one door across from the window, steel and shut tight. A large bulletin board hung next to it, crammed to the hilt with papers. Faces, names, words looked scrutinously on at him like he was an intruder. A lone fluorescent light flickered meekly in the corner, washing the room in an eerie greenish glow. Lightning flickered through the slats in the window, followed by close thunder that seeped through his skin and bounced around in his ribcage. Jack couldn't discern whether or not it was his heart.

 _Go inside. Sit down. Talk to no one in the lobby. Wait._

Jack looked around at the decrepit room. 'Lobby' was a generous overstatement. The given demands floated through his mind, but there was nobody else in the waiting room except for him; he had made sure of that when keeping watch earlier. If he had seen someone go in, there was a good chance he would never have set foot in the place.

The room was silent except for the sound of rainwater dripping into a bucket somewhere, and the wind shoring rain up against the window behind him. He looked down at the water also running off of his clothes, and shrugged the sopping coat off of his shoulders and onto the tile. It had been somewhat chilly outside, despite being spring in this part of the world, and Jack shivered now that he was out of the rain. He could only hope he would dry off faster without the coat, but even then, Jack was wearing another layer under the black long-sleeved shirt.

Jack had tried his best to keep himself from becoming reliant on things like armor, but as the years dragged on, he found it was harder and harder not to. He wasn't sure exactly when he had begun to notice the encroaching unease that crept up on him when he wasn't wearing any, but it was there. It was there, and he was ashamed of it. He had never felt the need to wear kevlar under his clothes before the mountain. Before the Rams.

Jack shook his head vigorously, trying to ward off the unpleasant memory before it could fully form in his mind, and sidestepped the doormat. The floorboards beneath the cracked tile groaned under his weight; probably rotted with water damage, and for a moment Jack considered turning back, but the chairs were suddenly in front of him.

He sat down, eyes landing on the bulletin board again. The light where it was was useless at illuminating much of anything, and he had to squint to see. All he could make out was a calendar on one side and what looked like a few more recent newspaper clippings pinned up randomly. All the photos and ink on the papers was faded and blurry, as if they had been put up long ago. Push pins littered the floor, along with a few other pages that had fallen.

The minutes dragged by, and Jack could feel the exhaustion slowly returning to him, the lull of the rainfall against the far wall helping it to seep back into the edges of his mind. There was no clock in here; only the incessant dripping of the water into the bucket and the occasional flickers of lightning.

Jack leaned back in the chair and rested his head against the wall, but some of the exhaustion fled at the sight of a wobbly line of bullet holes that staggered across the plaster. Quickly, he sat up, scanning the room for any more. He saw some spots on the far wall that could have been more, but he couldn't be sure it wasn't mildew. He noticed other things, though. The water damage and mold on the walls looked funny in some places, and Jack twisted in his chair to get a closer look at the one behind him. There was definitely grime growing on the drywall, but the dark marks beneath it were not any kind of stain. Jack frowned in thought, running a finger over where flames had licked away at the paint, up the wall and onto the ceiling where the soot had clouded and eaten away at the plaster. _Fire._ Now that he looked, there were several similar signs of carnage littering the room.

 _What happened here?_

Something caught his eye by the doorframe. It was a nameplate. If he squinted he could read it, but a sound drew his attention away. He turned, dread pooling in his stomach.

A horse- a lean mare with long, ropy legs stood at the edge of where the dim light reached. It whinnied softly at him, its sable body bleeding into the gloom until it was near indistinguishable from the wall behind it. Its ears nearly brushed the ceiling and its eyes like coals seemed to carve into him with a deathly intensity. It raised a hoof sedately to step toward him, moving like a creature submerged in water, and the dread in Jack's chest suddenly flared into waking fear. He buried his head in his hands with a shiver, not wanting to look at it any longer.

"Are you alone?"

The voice shattered the quiet, and Jack had to bite down on a startled scream, jerking his head out of his hands. He gaped at where the mare had been standing, but saw nothing in the twitching, watery light. He was half relieved it was gone, but twice as disturbed that he had seen it to begin with. Once again, the gruff voice growled at him through the door, and he jumped again.

" _Are you alone?"_ it hissed. Jack stood and faced the door, fumbling for words. It was a male voice, gruff and flinty and none too cheerful.

"Yes," he breathed. After a heartbeat of taught silence, he cleared his throat and tried again. "Yes, I'm alone." He tried taking a step forward, wincing when his boots squealed on the wet tile. _So much for professionalism,_ he thought.

The speaker seemed to hesitate for a heartbeat before the handle jiggled, and the heavy door swung open at last. Jack's stomach lurched, and he resisted the urge to press back against the wall. He had at least _hoped_ the street surgeon would be human.

A creature from the stars, it almost seemed to glide through the door, towering lanky and pale over Jack like a wiry building on spindly legs. It was wearing nothing but a wrinkled lab coat over what first appeared to Jack to be long fur, but the more he looked at it he realized that it was actually ribbon-fine feathers. They cascaded off its body like a gown, ivory and tawny brown down its back. Its face was bare and narrow like a crow's, curving down and ending in a sickle-like beak that was curled in a sneer. It was a species Jack had not seen before.

The creature had barely laid eyes on Jack when it threw its head back and let out an exasperated snarl. It pinched its brow with a thin, scaled hand, and Jack saw small, sharp teeth lining the back of its mouth grit in frustration.

" _Shit,"_ it hissed, balling his fists at its side. It stood in tense silence for a moment, composing itself, Jack assumed. Its eyes, sharp and bright chestnut, blinked open and fixated on the man in a cold glare. They were the only window into its irritation as its stiff anger devolved into composed surliness, and Jack noticed that its eyes were rimmed with brown that trailed halfway down the sides of its muzzle like tear tracks. It had two long, thin feathers that stuck up off either side of its head like twin antennae, and though they didn't appear to move, they still twitched slightly backward in irritation.

Jack had his hands clasped behind him patiently as the surgeon looked him over with calculating eyes. They started at the water all over the tile, and moved slowly upward- growing increasingly disgusted- until he was staring into Jack's eyes. It was scowling at him like something that had crawled up out of a drain, and Jack felt his palms prickle uncomfortably under the scrutiny. Beneath all of it, he was somewhat offended at the blatancy of the creature's distaste for him, but he didn't let it show, and only stared awkwardly back at through in the dead air and rocked back and forth on his feet.

"You know–" it growled, speaking at last and slipping a box of cigarettes out of its lab coat pocket. Despite its glare it sounded almost pleasant. "Stalking people for hours in the rain this far north will hand you your death of cold; it will." Jack sucked air in through his teeth and stopped dead, clenching his hands behind his back so tightly they hurt. The surgeon only raised a brow. There was nothing for him to say; he had been caught.

The surgeon gingerly lit a cigarette with a zippo, behaving as if nothing had been said, though when he glanced sidelong at Jack, one of his russet eyes was crinkled in smug amusement; probably at Jack's expression. The rest of the creature still radiated venom. Smoke curled through the air, but Jack smelled nothing but mold.

"I was staring down at you for a long while, thinking– 'No. No, it can't possibly be him. He wouldn't carry himself like a terrified street person.'" Jack tried not to frown, and tensed his shoulders instead. The surgeon continued, taking periodic drags from his cigarette and leaning on one leg like they were partaking in nothing more than idle smalltalk. "'Wouldn't _look_ like a terrified street person.'" It talked like someone would about a newspaper article. Jack breathed patiently, keeping a placid expression fixed on his face while he mentally berated himself into keeping quiet.

"But, God–" it trailed off, suddenly stretching an impossibly long arm over to the bulletin board and yanking a paper away. It shoved the leaflet in Jack's face, and he didn't need light to recognize his own eyes staring back at him in carbon print. _Younger eyes,_ he thought agonizingly. One of the millions of wanted posters that had wallpapered the world. "Here you are." Jack blinked around the paper at him, and nodded once.

"You," he repeated. "A legend, coming to _me_ for help." He didn't sound happy about this; rather the opposite. "I barely recognized you under that- that..." He furrowed his brow in confusion, waving a hand at Jack's head. "... mane," he sneered. Jack almost rolled his eyes.

"Of course," the creature continued, letting the paper drift lazily from his claws onto the tile. "I suppose anyone would look like this-" he waved a claw flippantly at Jack. "-after so many long, hard years of ghosting on the world." The end of the sentence dipped and curled down into a venomous growl that shuddered and filled the alien's chest like a simmering cup, and it spurred a candle of anger in Jack's and he frowned. He had lost some weight, sure, and grown a beard, but he couldn't look as terrible as the surgeon was putting it.

"You must have quite an agenda laid out for the day when you kill him." There was no questioning who the creature spoke of. Jack gripped his hands harder behind his back, sighing quietly under his breath and willing the flash fire of irritation that was growing in him to die down. He considered himself a patient man, but the surgeon's icy jabber was particularly annoying at this time of morning. _Anything_ was annoying at this time of morning. Jack didn't take his gaze off him, staring as passively as he could manage, but he allowed his eyes to betray him, hardening like clear ice as he prayed silently that the creature would hold its tongue.

It did not.

"Or perhaps–" it growled, "–you're no closer to your goal than when you began." That did it. Jack glared vehemently at the surgeon and clenched his fists at his side, unable to hold a passive attitude any longer. He took a step forward, closing the space between them, and craned his neck until he had its gaze- unfazed as ever- locked even with his. Fear and shame slithered beneath the bloated anger in Jack's chest, but he tamped the emotions down further.

"Enough," Jack growled, speaking for the first time in as many days. His voice was hoarse from disuse, but equally raw with anger at the creature's jabs toward him- or rather, the truth in them. The surgeon stared at him stonily for a moment, and Jack wondered in the back of his mind if he had crossed a line. The worm of fear in his chest grew amid the anger, but the surgeon suddenly grinned at him snidely, baring pointed teeth in a smug smile that stretched wide.

" _Aha,"_ it crooned. _"There_ he is." Jack blinked, and deflated when he realized he had fallen for the surgeon's egging. Stepping away from him, he sat down again, anger spent. The surgeon took another drag and spoke again.

"You know how much this is going to cost me," he said. "And you, for that matter." Jack nodded. Whether he had been avoiding the public eye or not didn't matter; he was still a wanted man, along with any cohorts he had made.

"I'll pay," Jack said quietly. "I'll pay whatever you want. I've already been turned away enough." It was true; there weren't many ways he could get medical help without complications. He hadn't even ventured to try until recently, and it had proven more difficult than he would've thought reasonable. "Official" doctors were few and far between, but what made them official was the fact that they all were in league with Aku. He had seen other street surgeons for injuries, sure, but he wasn't seeing this creature to have a wound stitched.

"Please," he continued. "I need a doctor– a _real_ doctor." The surgeon snorted.

"'Real,'" he echoed. "I'm guessing by 'real' you mean I'm not some back-street butcher who thinks he can perform an endarterectomy just because he bought a medical textbook online, yes?" Jack blinked. He had no earthly idea what an endarterectomy was.

"… Yes… something like that. You know your field."

He nodded, standing a bit taller. "Damn right." Jack frowned at his hubris, but kept silent this time.

"I need your help," he said. "Your assistant already said you would know what to do." The surgeon barked a laugh, tossing his head and once more revealing the rows of teeth.

" _Assistant?_ You mean Kjorn?" Kjorn must have been the husky sounding voice on the other end of the payphone. He had been the one that had given Jack the instructions to get here. He had been the one to schedule the visit. The surgeon laughed haughtily again and smiled crookedly at Jack. "Kjorn is a glorified secretary. A _filter_ really– but yes, I cqn." Despite himself, Jack exhaled in relief.

"Now what I can't understand," he said. "-is why you would risk both our necks for something that can be remedied with a simple blood test. How did you put it? 'The problem is that there's no problem'?" Jack stared at the surgeon, and again the strange feeling snaked at the edge of his mind and trailed downward until it was sitting in the pit of his stomach like a ball of ice.

"Yes," he whispered. The surgeon's birdlike face was a mask of stone as he put out his cigarette on the tile and leaned against the wall, crossing his arms. Jack wanted to wring his hands, but since he had said it, the uneasy feeling began to spread like a disease through him. Yes, there was something wrong with him, and his surety of it only grew with the silence and rain. The surgeon met his eyes, suddenly shedding the sardonic demeanor for an almost scholarly one; looking for all the world like a mathematician trying to solve a difficult equation. Jack closed his eyes, not willing to give an answer.

"Please." Jack's voice barely carried over the sound of the rain outside. More lightning flickered, casting Its shadow. "I know this is endangering your work here," Jack murmured, still not looking at the surgeon. "And your life, but–"

"Okay, stop," the surgeon interjected, waving away Jack's statement with a scaled hand. "Don't go getting all weepy on me." More silence. Painfully slowly, he pulled out another cigarette and lit it, taking his time with the first drag. He tipped his head from side to side with his eyes closed, head feathers swaying. Finally, he sighed and shook his head.

"I must be crazy," he muttered, before turning and waving a hand curtly, signaling for Jack to follow him through the door. He shuddered, letting out a breath he didn't even know he'd been holding as the surgeon turned to grab the door handle. Jack rushed to meet him.

"Thank you," he wheezed. The door squealed on its hinges as the surgeon pushed it open, and Jack felt relieved to be leaving the decrepit room behind, but lightning flickered through the window slats a final time behind them, and dread sunk in his chest. The shadow of the wraithlike mare painted the burned wall out of the corner of his eye for a moment before it blinked out of sight, disappearing back into the gloom. The thunder that followed echoed the pounding in Jack's chest, and a feeling like a cold rush of water broke over him that screamed to get out of the room as quickly as possible. It was a feeling that he'd become all too familiar with.

"Wait," he said, stretching up to grab the alien's shoulder. "I need to have something else done." The creature halted halfway through the door, and turned one narrow, mahogany eye on him. Jack glanced back into the room before taking the glower as license to continue. He released the surgeon from his grip and took a step back, still not entirely sure whether he would lash out, and cleared his throat.

"I need you to look at my eyes," he stammered. It was all he could manage. The surgeon raised a brow, but still didn't turn to face Jack. "I don't know what it's called."

"You... want an eye test?" the surgeon asked. He sounded confused by the request, but Jack nodded regardless, glancing again to the wall where the horse's shadow had been cast upon and feeling anxiety crawl up his spine.

"Yes," he said. Eye test must have been the right term.

"Eye test," the surgeon repeated, throwing an arm halfheartedly in the air. "Fine. Whatever." Shaking his head, he shoved the door open the rest of the way and disappeared into an even darker place, muttering something about 'some legend...'.

Jack rushed to keep up, not looking back into the murkiness of the waiting room for the terrible feeling that prickled down his neck. He stood up straighter and focused his eyes forward into this new place. He would not be swayed by mares and shadows.

The bang of the door falling shut startled him out of his thought, and he saw that the surgeon had led them into a dark hallway. Unlike the room, with at least its one sad, flickering light and windows, this one was pitch black. It was so dark, in fact, that he had to stop and reach out until his fingers brushed the wall to get the idea that it was even a hallway. At first he thought the surgeon had disappeared, but then he heard the clicking of talons and the nearly imperceptible sighing of wispy feathers sweeping across the tile. He was moving down the corridor toward the front of the building.

"Come on," he barked. "We're burning moonlight."

"Ah- um," Jack realized he had never been given a name and stumbled over his words. "Hey! What is your name?"

The small sounds fell silent as the surgeon stopped somewhere ahead, and Jack swore he heard him scoff. "Wouldn't you like to know," he said, voice bouncing along the tile. Jack sighed in frustration. "But, I suppose you should know- my _clients_ call me Sigg." Talons clicked on the tile again as the street surgeon continued forward, already far from Jack by some amazing means.

Jack blinked, mulling the name over in his head before taking a step toward where Sigg's voice had come from, but he found that he couldn't move. Other than the one hand he had on the wall, he could see nothing. The blackness smothered him, and the sound of thunder from somewhere outside drowned out the sound of Sigg walking. For a few moments, he was alone in there, and it scared him.

 _I will not be swayed by shadows,_ he thought, closing his eyes. He couldn't even tell they were closed. _I will not be swayed by shadows. I will not be swayed by shadows._

But fear was creeping in on Jack, and even when he managed to take a few steps, he felt it coiling through his legs. What would he know about himself when this night was done? What would be different from now on?

Feeling his way through that corridor, Jack felt isolated from everything in the moments where thunder was the only sound. He didn't want to fear this– he hadn't feared it at _all_ before. _Before the rams,_ he thought with a shiver. But as he followed this creature through the hall, he couldn't help fearing these dark places where nothing existed, and horses could hide.

 **A/N:** Ugggghhhhh this took forever. x-x OK but yeah, here it is! I actually have the rough draft typed out; it's unfinished right now but I figured I wouldn't make it a oneshot considering that even unfinished it was well over 17K words. Jack is indeed in what used to be Norway, and I figure that some things like language would have managed to stick around. The species that Sigg is are one of my own and the landscape on their planet is similar to Norway, so it would be natural for him to want to settle there, but more on him later ;)

This is my first fic I've posted so be gentle heheh. But this will play into Jack discovering a handful of things that he didn't want to know about himself, and at this point he's been followed by this horse for quite a long time... (It's just the horse, too; no rider... yet)

Anyway, thanks for reading, fave, follow, review, whatever and check out art for this and other Samurai Jack stuff on my tumblr, bye =D


	2. Primun Non Nocere

_Heavy frost blanketed the ground, covering everything like a shimmering veil. It had crept up the trunks of neighboring pine trees, and the early sun glinted off the icy needles that hadn't yet melted. A rook croaked hoarsely in the distance, but otherwise, the forest was silent with winter on its doorstep._

 _Jack lay flat on spongy mat of pine fronds, with nothing to guard against the chill but the clothes on his back and the smoldering remains of a fire he had built the night before. The pines pressed in close here, a spot Jack had picked so the heat would be better contained, but the night had seemed to steal it away with the wind. He stared through the trees at the cold stars, disappearing now against the paling sky. It seemed like the dawn took an age to pass in this part of the world, and even though rays of pale sunlight shot through the pines, he could still see a few perverse stars in the sky. It was a colorless, cloudless land, and the sky never turned pink in the morning. It only turned from inky black to gray to a cold, flat blue that stayed until the sun dipped and plunged the forest back into a long night that would only get longer. Even the sun, that would normally hang yellow and fat in the sky anywhere else, flew small and platinum white far above the earth like a cold satellite._

 _He hadn't seen anyone else for eleven days. The forest was massive, and it had seemed to swallow up civilization like a huge creature, or drive it away entirely. Every time he thought the trees would start to thin out, or that he would happen upon a city, night would suddenly be there and another day had passed with no luck. It was quiet, too. There were no sounds of the city. No engines. No flying ships or metal things to crowd the air, and no great babble from thousands of mouths or the underlying hum of distant highways. Traveling through it was almost disorienting; it felt like in the days since he had been walking, the world had fallen silent and he was all that remained. This land was barren of people, and Jack wondered idly if it had always been that way, even with Aku having ruined the rest of the earth._

 _Wondering was all he could do right now, or wanted to do, at least. His clothes were already somewhat warm, and if he didn't move they stayed that way, but even shifting reminded him of the cold that had gnawed away at his legs during the night. He had finally given up his old clothes; trading them away in the last village he had passed through in exchange for a coat and other clothes better suited for travel in the winter. It had hurt him to give them up. They had been the last physical tie he had to his homeland, but since the Rams, such things felt almost like dead weight to him. Holding onto the past had slowly begun to feel less like motivation and more like a burden, and he didn't want to freeze to death because of a burden._

 _Still too chilled to want to move, Jack decided against setting out just yet, and rolled on his side to face the fire. The warmth from the embers bathed his face and he sighed, closing his eyes. Maybe it wouldn't hurt to go back to sleep; he could set out again later in the day, when it was warmer. It wasn't like him to sleep late, but if only miles more of this endless forest were what was waiting for him, it felt pointless to rush._

Heh, _he thought cynically._ Maybe I could stay until Spring. Stay forever. _He entertained the idea for a moment. It would be new, at least; no more running, no more overwhelming cities, no people. The fire popped, and the branches above rustled quietly as something crawled through them. No more heartache. He could live in this wild land and pretend that none of it had ever happened. He could pretend the world was untouched._

 _More rooks clattered in the trees above him, laughing. Jack shook his head; what was he thinking? There was_ never _time to waste. Never. There was a hunt to be had, and Jack had limited time to carry it out. Besides, isolating himself wouldn't end the heartache; nothing was going to cure that._

 _Taking in a cold breath, Jack closed his eyes and braced himself for the aches from the cold, but when he sat up, nothing came. What little stiffness there was in his joints eased up when he stood, and didn't return. Jack frowned in confusion at this, bending his knees. This had been the routine in the mornings, and after every night, each of them colder than the last, he expected the pain to finally catch up with him. So far, it hadn't._

 _Once he had tamped out the fire, Jack wasted no time leaving the stand of trees. He had left a branch a little ways from the fire, pointing in the direction he had been walking. It had always been the first thing he did when sleeping in forests, but in every direction regardless- and even after walking away- there still wasn't any change in scenery that he could see. The troubling thought that he may have been going in circles flitted into his mind like an anxious jaybird, but the thought was half put to rest a few minutes later when he came to the lake._

 _It was wide, and definitely a landmark Jack hadn't seen yet. Unlike the turbulent rivers he had run across in the woods, this was like a massive silver mirror that had dropped to earth, and like everywhere else, it was strangely silent._

 _Jack was happy enough to have found the landmark, but he was almost disappointed it wasn't a river. He wasn't as quick to trust lake water for drinking, and boiling it was tedious. Pebbles clattering underfoot, he walked over to the water's edge and winced at the sight of his reflection. His hair was messed up quite a bit from sleeping on the ground and on pine branches, and he hadn't paid it much attention for a couple days. For what it was worth, he looked terrible. He blinked in idle confusion. He could re-tie his hair each morning, so why had this forest made him so lax? Was it the isolation, or the short days? Maybe it was the cold._

 _The troubled thoughts tumbled around in Jack's head as crouched next to the water and pulled his hair down, but a sound suddenly got his attention, and he jerked in surprise._

"Aw, awh, awh!" _Jack blinked. A scrawny rook had lighted on the beach near him, needling through the pebbles with its beak. He hadn't even heard it land. It stalked around for a moment, eyeing Jack with one beady white eye before it crouched in the shallows and began flapping its wings frantically in the water. Jack blinked passively at the washing bird before turning back to his own reflection and shifting onto his knees._

 _He combed through his hair with his fingers, wetting his hands in the water if it felt like there was any sap. Looking at himself, he suddenly got a funny feeling, and he turned again to the rook. It was further away now, tittering idly and picking at its feathers. They were a glossy black, but Jack noticed paler streaks in them down its back and face. It was spindly, and its tail was frayed with age. The feeling spread, and it began to feel more terrible than confused. He turned back to the water and ran his hands again through his hair- looking this time- and the dread only increased, but the more he looked, the more it began to sway back towards confusion. Then, relief gradually chased both feelings away like a warm wind._

 _No gray hairs. Not yet; he still had time._

 _The rook cawed throatily at him and flapped away, silent as a ghost. The pebbles on the beach didn't even shift at its wingbeats. Jack watched it stagger over the lake, standing completely still, as if the slightest movement would shatter it across the sky. With the strange things he had noticed out of the corner of his eye lately, he almost believed it might actually happen, but it didn't. The dark, raggedy shape finally slid away over the distant treeline, and one last faint caw rippled over the water. The rook was gone. Jack's breath billowed out in front of him in a cloud of steam, and one of his hands shook with relief he hadn't known he would feel for such a thing._

You made it, _he thought._ You were old, but you made it.

 _Looking at himself again, Jack frowned. He couldn't really be that old, could he? He tried to remember how old his father had been, but the realization slammed into him when he couldn't recall it. At first a lump rose in his throat out of grief, but it quickly disappeared in a wash of anger. He kicked at the beach, sending pebbles scattering and scewing the glassy water._

" _Am I just going to forget now?!" he shouted, not knowing what else to do or who he was even cursing. He had already been separated from his home, and now it seemed like time was going to take even the memory of it; like a rock weathered by water. He wasn't showing signs of age yet, but there could be explanations for that, and the thought did nothing to stave off the dread._

It's going to happen, _a small voice needled; timid and jeering and horribly true._ It's going to sneak up on you.

"No," _he hissed. He wouldn't let it. His hairpin was still clenched in one hand, and without a word Jack reeled back and threw it as far as he could. If there were going to be any gray hairs popping up in the near future, he didn't want to see them, and he wouldn't waste time fiddling with something as insignificant as his appearance. Jack didn't bother to watch it land ; he had turned his eyes away from the lake altogether. Seeing his reflection was suddenly unnerving, and he stared instead at the line of trees far away, where the bird had disappeared._

 _The sun silently rose in the distance, bright but cold. Rooks laughed at him in raucous caws from beyond the pines, the shrill sounds bouncing off the water in waves. Jack's hand still shook, and he grabbed it, feeling nothing. The tremors died._

The clicking of talons and the wall under Jack's fingers was all that guided him along as Sigg led him blindly through a maze of hallways. With every few turns he wondered if any lightning would shine through a window or skylight, but claps of thunder came and went, and the hall stayed dark as ever. Jack couldn't tell, but it seemed they were moving away from any outer walls. Sigg offered no explanation.

The wall changed, becoming smoother in some parts and more rough in others. Jack wondered how many of the rough patches were actually fire damage, and his arm tingled with unease at the thought of brushing over bullet holes. At the thought, he expected some to suddenly appear and he tensed, but the wall stretched on unscathed.

Ahead, he heard Sigg change direction, the clicks moving to the left of him rather than in front. The wall under his hand fell away, and he was left standing in an open space.

Jack looked from side to side, squinting, but it was useless; the building was still as dark as if his eyes were closed. Without the wall, he worried he might stumble or hurt himself. He must have made an uncertain noise, because he heard Sigg's talons fall silent and the fibrous feathers sighed on the tile as he turned.

"Come on," he said. Jack wondered if his species could just see well in the dark, or if the surgeon had simply stalked his haunt so many times he didn't need the light. Either seemed possible.

"Why keep it so dark? I saw the light on in the other room," Jack said. He didn't speak loudly; the deserted place felt like somewhere to speak low. Sigg apparently didn't feel as compelled, and his gruff voice filled up the space like a reverberating bowl.

"Avoiding suspicion, mostly, but the ice last winter froze out the breakers for this part of the building anyway." Jack nodded, humming in acknowledgment, and took a wary few steps forward, reaching out blindly with his hands.

He started when his hands suddenly ran against something that wasn't a wall- cold and smooth and flat. It wasn't very tall, and when he felt over the edge there was another surface below covered in dusty papers. It was some kind of counter.

An impatient whistle echoed off of walls Jack couldn't see, and his eyes fixated on a dim point of orange that streaked through the air above the floor somewhere in short, erratic loops. Sigg's cigarette.

"Geddon with it," he growled. Jack felt his way along the counter and found that it curved around in a big circle. Feeling the strange, massive desk, Jack tried to envision what the rest of this place could possibly look like, but beyond what his hands could tell him, all of it was still only an inky void. He could vaguely picture the desk, but no more. He was blind here.

The cigarette's light trailed further away, and Jack reluctantly let go of the counter and walked blindly until the clicks of the surgeon's talons were right in front of him. He tried to reach out for a wall, but both hands swept through empty air. They had been walking for what felt like forever.

Suddenly, there was the silhouette of Sigg against a doorway and glorious, glorious light. It was dim and watery, but it was startling to Jack. The surgeon was shoving a heavy steel door open, pressing up against it with his shoulder. It was a wide door, one of two that spanned the width of the hall, and Jack noticed neither of them had handles. From the effort it took for Sigg to shove one open he guessed that they must have been automatic at one time.

Sigg braced against the door and waved him through, snubbing his cigarette on the metal. Jack was dismayed to see another corridor past him.

This shorter hallway was in as much a state of disarray as the 'lobby' he had been in before. Reddish light from the city filtered in through large plate glass windows, all of them marred with cracks and cross hatched with hair-thin wire. Jack thought they looked more like something that belonged in a prison. Blackened bits of ceiling plaster littered the floor, which sloped up and curved toward another set of doors.

Sigg led him up the corridor to the doors, but Jack ran ahead and shouldered one of them open before the surgeon could reach it. Sigg stopped in composed surprise, raising an eyebrow in confision. Jack shrugged, still bracing the heavy door against his back, and the surgeon only glowered as he shouldered past.

The next corridor flanked a courtyard set in the middle of the building, but it was densely overgrown and riddled with graffiti. The other side was lined with doors. Both walls were marred with fire damage and bullet holes.

Jack saw that only some of the doors were closed, and others stood open idly. A few had been blown from the hinges entirely, and were lying inside the rooms. The light couldn't reach inside the open ones enough for him to see anything, but it was the closed ones that unnerved him. He didn't want to contemplate why they were closed.

Everything they came across- whether it was equipment or part of the building- was in terrible disarray, aged and derelict or burned beyond recognition. One of the windows had been busted out by gunfire, and rain fell into the hall. Bedding and equipment of all sorts was strewn about, laying up against the walls on either side. Strange beds on wheels, monitors, locked cabinets, myriads of tools, sheets and blankets and machines. All of it looked like it hadn't been touched in years. Jack shivered when he saw a pink blanket lying in a stagnant puddle. It was too small for even a child, and three smiling frogs embroidered on the fleece stared silently at him as he passed.

Jack expected Sigg to say something, or at least show some reverence, but the surgeon's eyes remained forward, unfazed. He swept past the carnage like it wasn't even there. Soon, the windows ended, and the brief break from the dark ended as the hallway grew dim again. Not completely black this time, but dim enough.

"So," Jack said. "Is Sigg your real name?" One chestnut eye arched confusedly over the surgeon's shoulder, and Jack heard him laugh gruffly under his breath.

"You really don't know anything about dealing with criminals, do you?" he jested, shaking his head

Jack glowered. He thought 'criminal' was a bit of a generous title for the street surgeon. "I know more than you think," he muttered, sidestepping a long metal rack with hooks adorning the top. He thought it was a rather odd-looking thing. "The people I've dealt with in the past were a lot less careful and a lot more..." His eyes ran over the heaps of junk and the crumbling walls. "... organized." Jack thought he saw the surgeon's head feathers tick back in irritation, or curiosity, or not at all. He didn't speak again, and Jack didn't goad him.

Sigg led him through another set of doors into more merciless darkness and through nearly a thousand more halls and corridors until finally, there was light again.

There was an immediate contrast, even in the dark, to the rest of the building. The floor here was scrubbed clean to the point of shining, and from what he could tell no debris was lying around either. The chemical smell, which he had noticed after he'd first gotten there, was even stronger now, and sharper. The light shone from underneath closed doors that stretched a ways down, and he heard the sound of the surgeon opening one of them.

A pale, fluorescent wedge cut a path across the pristine floor into what had to be the exam room, and Jack followed it, stepping through the door after the surgeon, who whipped into the room and let the door fall shut without a word.

The exam room was smaller than Jack expected. A bland color paint that wasn't quite beige but wasn't white either coated the walls, and almost everything else it seemed. Scores of hand-drawn charts were tacked to the far wall, and a long counter with a sink lined another. In the middle of the room was a strange bench and behind it, a wicked looking machine hung bolted to the wall. Everything looked almost hand polished.

Sigg swept through the room and began rummaging through a locked cabinet. Jack watched as he pulled out a steno pad and an absolutely absurd binder. Despite being several inches wide to begin with, it looked ready to fall apart for all the paper inside it. Sigg looked equally as ridiculous trying to juggle the two items as he sat on a metal stool by the counter.

Jack must have been looking at him funny, because Sigg looked back at him and held each of the items up in regard. "No computers," was all he said.

Even though the surgeon hadn't said anything yet, Jack stood there and watched as Sigg took out a pen and began scribbling down God knows how many notes on the steno pad. The surgeon glanced occasionally at him before returning to his frantic chicken scratching. Jack was beginning to understand the size of the binder.

"Scale," Sigg barked, pointing with his pen to a black square set in the floor against the chart wall. Jack trudged over to the scale and stared at some of the charts. They were mostly about substance abuse or cholesterol, but one that caught Jack's eye was about mental health. He wasn't able to read much of it before Sigg interjected.

 _Sleep deprivation for long periods of time can lead to high stress levels and depreciating cognitive ability. Insomnia has been linked to several mental conditions as a causation and as you are, I was-_

"... like a chicken bone. Are you even listening?" Sigg crowed. "I said you're one sixty-two even. I suggest you try eating something other than sticks and bugs for a change." Jack blinked, staring at the poster, but he could see nothing about 'as you are, I was.' There was nothing that said anything even similar to it, but Jack had seen it there, in print. Confusion ate at him as he scanned a few other posters, thinking that maybe he had read something subconsciously out of the corner of his eye, but no such thing was written there either.

"I... eat what I can," he murmured, not taking his eye off the wall. Sigg didn't look up from his writing.

"If you have money to pay for a street surgeon, you have money to pay for food. Hell," he said. "You're paying double just for being _you,_ so you're either stiffing me, or you're dense. Take your pick." Jack frowned.

"Double," Jack echoed. "You said nothing about double." The surgeon shrugged, a shrewd glint in his eyes.

"You said you would pay anything," he jested. Jack clenched his fists at his sides, glaring at Sigg with as much composure as he could muster. The longer he spent time around this wretched jackdaw, the more he found his patience to be dwindling. He held his tongue, though. He wouldn't risk this visit in favor of his temper.

"Double," he growled. "Very well." The surgeon smiled, baring his teeth, and jotted down more notes.

"Well nonetheless, your diet is deplorable. You're half-starved."

Jack glowered at Sigg. "I don't like populated areas." _Don't push it,_ he thought, and lucky for the surgeon, he didn't. He only scowled at Jack with more disappointment in his stare than anger, and slowly he turned back to his work. There had been something else in the surgeon's eyes, but Jack couldn't place it. He wasn't sure he wanted to try. Sigg continued with a slew of questions.

 _Are you on medication? Do you take drugs? Any known allergies? Do you have a history of alcoholism?_ And many more. Jack noticed that when Sigg was asking questions or writing things down, his demeanor changed significantly. He dropped the cockiness and took up a more professional attitude. Jack tolerated him a fair deal more when he was like that. When all was said and done, Jack had answered a ton of them and Sigg had two new pages of notes in his pad.

"Alright, get on the bench." Sigg pointed to the ugly beige thing in the middle of the room and stood, walking over to the black steel machine bolted to the wall. Jack's irritation was chased away by brief panic as he sat down on the paper. The machine looked more fitting for the times; coal colored and unnatural. It reminded him of the city. Sigg stepped around the far side of it and pulled what looked like a control console out of its hull, and with the push of a button it awoke. As it hummed to life, a metal arm coiled away from the inside of it with a hiss. A capped needle glittered at the end of it, almost two inches long. Jack jumped, flinching away from the machine and standing ramrod still well away from it.

"What's this?" he shouted. Sigg raised his hands in defense and shot Jack a thunderous look.

"Do you want your blood test or not?" he said. Jack balked at the hulk of machinery and glared at Sigg as if it wasn't obvious.

"You're joking," he said, nodding his head toward the device. _"That?"_ The surgeon's feathers twitched as he scowled at him in silence, and Jack knew that he wasn't. He had expected whatever treatments Sigg had in store for him would be beyond his knowledge, and of course; his time, but the thought of leaving his well-being in the care of a machine was disconcerting to say the least. He had seen machines kill countless times. Not once had he seen one care. He figured it would be ridiculous to suddenly fling his trust upon one now.

Jack shook his head slowly at Sigg, who still had a claw on the controls. "No." The surgeon blinked. Anger glinted in his eyes, but Jack didn't care. _"No,"_ he growled. "I'm not doing this. Not _like_ this." Sigg blinked.

"This is the only way I can run any tests," he said, gesturing to the mechanical arm with his own. Jack trembled, balling his hands into fists. He took one threatening step forward. Sigg was taller than Jack, but a small part of him was pleased to see genuine fear in the alien's eyes at his advance. It was easy to forget the weight of his reputation since he spent so much time on his own, but seeing the impact written on Sigg's face was telling enough. he wondered what rumors about him this one creature alone had heard before. He wondered how many of them were true. Sigg backed away from Jack toward the wall of charts, eyes wide and pinning like a terrified animal.

His voice was low and hollow. "I want-" he stammered. Jack caught the wobbliness at the ends of his words. "I want you to know firsthand." Trailing off, he didn't break eye contact with Jack, and only moved to pull the lapel of his labcoat further to the side with a scaled hand. Jack saw the holster peeking through his ribbonlike feathers, and the weighty pistol attached to it at the surgeon's side. "I'll do it," he said, voice still wavering a bit, but he steadied it and stood taller. "I don't care who you are." Jack scoffed.

"What do you take me for?" he said, pulling the hem of his shirt up. Sigg glanced down and snarled, baring his fangs at Jack's own gun, as well as the Kevlar vest under his shirt. He gave Jack a withering look.

"Of course," he muttered. "Because why would I expect you of all people to bring a sword to a gun fight?" His voice dripped with sarcasm.

"Common sense, that's what," Jack growled, dodging the bait. The alien's eyes narrowed, and for a moment Jack thought he saw doubt or suspicion cross his face. Before he could fully tell, it disappeared, and Jack silently willed him not to pry. Thankfully, he didn't; scrutinizing with eyes only. Dead air bloomed between them as they stared each other down. Both their hands hovered over their pistols in silent threat, and Jack

Sigg acted tough, but Jack had seen what the surgeon hadn't told. His voice had been wavering, and the terror was in his eyes. It was very possible- likely even- that he was only afraid of _him,_ but Jack still wondered, rolling the thought around in his head. Looking at the slight tremor in the surgeon's arms, Jack wondered if he had even fired a gun at all.

He looked from Sigg to the machine and back again. Agonizing uncertainty coiled in his chest, but the reason he had come tugged again at his mind. Finally, Jack yielded, concealing the gun and lowering his hands. Sigg remained obstinate.

"I'll give my blood," he said. "but not to _that."_ Jack pointed to the machine, and Sigg blinked at him in heated astonishment. He glanced from the machine to Jack in evident contemplation and after an age heaved an exasperated sigh. He let his labcoat fall back over his pistol and walked over to the machine. Fear jabbed at Jack, but he stood a little less on edge when the arm and its needle folded in on itself and back into the machine's hull. The surgeon stormed over to the counter and began to rummage through a cabinet.

Jack leaned against the door and heaved his own wavering sigh. He was regretful that it had come to blows, but he could never be careful enough. The machine certainly looked the part of one of Aku's scraps of metal, just in a different form perhaps; another drone built to kill him with one strike to an artery. He just couldn't trust something that could make so much sense even in a world turned upside-down.

In one ear, random snippets of what sounded like voices piped up and cut off. There were no words or tone, just sporadic sounds that sounded both far away and right next to him at the same time. White dots and lines twitched and spasmed on the wall out of the corner of his eye, but Jack didn't need to look. He knew he saw things more often when he got worked up over something anyway. A pit formed in his stomach at the sight, and he silently willed Sigg to look up; to notice them too, but he didn't. No one ever did. He merely reached for his notepad and began scribbling. His head feathers were still. Despair twisted into Jack's gut like a knife. He couldn't bear it when he knew others couldn't see what he saw.

The points of light blinked back out of existence when Sigg suddenly pulled a syringe half the length of Jack's arm out of the cabinet, and his eyes widened. The surgeon scowled quietly and shrugged.

"We already _tried_ the easy way," he said bitterly. "So you get the hurts-like-a-bitch way." Jack gulped, and watched as Sigg uncoiled a long, plastic tube out of the side of the machine and screwed the end of it to the syringe. He snapped his fingers and pointed to the bench, but Jack shot him a venomous look and the surgeon rolled his eyes, teeth grit in a frustrated growl.

"Fine," he said. "I'm done." He strung the tube out to the door where Jack was standing, muttering all the way. "... practically breaks down in tears begging for my help, but _nooo..."_ He grumbled more as he wiped the inside of Jack's arm with a cold cloth and squinted down as if searching for something. Sigg's eyes widened and he promptly jammed the needle up under his skin. Jack grit his teeth, but he couldn't keep a hiss of pain down. Sigg laughed and fastened it in place with medical tape. " _Sure_ you don't want to sit down?" he jeered.

Jack glared vehemently at the surgeon. _"No,"_ he growled, talking through his teeth. Sigg shrugged almost jubilantly.

"Suit yourself," he said, and swept back over to the console. "Ready?" he chirped. Jack nodded, scowling. Sigg smiled one last time, flipped a switch on the side of the machine, and the world went white. At first Jack's arm only felt hot and numb, but then a plume of fire seemed to devour it, and he watched in agony as a black-red line shot up the tube. He grit his teeth so hard they hurt, and a strangled noise clawed out of his throat as a pump somewhere in the heart of the machine wrung his arm dry. Sigg was watching it all with a passive expression, arms folded as a glass canister in his nightmare machine's side filled with inky maroon. He shut his burning eyes and heard the surgeon chide him on clenching his fist.

"It'll just move the needle around," he said. "That will only make it worse." Jack groaned, and only watched with watering eyes as the blackish fluid rose. What felt like years dragged by before a loud _k-chunk!_ rang out and the IV spasmed to a stop.

Sigg whistled long and low, brows arching. "Thirteen point four seconds. That has to be some kind of record." A gutteral noise shuddered out of Jack's lungs and he was suddenly on the floor, trembling. The lines in the tile split and blurred before his eyes, and he closed them again.

"And _that's_ why-" rough, clawed hands wrapped around his good arm, pulling him off the floor like a ragdoll. "-we sit on the bench." Jack heaved shuddering breaths, lamenting the smirk in the surgeon's voice as he was hauled back onto the paper. This time he didn't object, and let himself fall sideways onto the bench. His head was swimming.

"Hey, uh-uh," Sigg snapped, and Jack felt himself jerked by the shoulder back into the sitting position. "Hand to the ground." Jack let his arm dangle off the edge of the bench while Sigg set to work undoing the IV. The room was still spinning, and he watched a rivulet of blood trail down his arm before the surgeon wrapped him up in obnoxiously orange gauze.

"Light-headed?" Sigg asked. Jack nodded, and immediately regretted it when the surgeon and the entire room appeared to tip over on their sides.

"You see," Sigg said. "If you had let me explain myself before freaking out, I would have told you that that arm-" he pointed to the insidious machine. "-gauges your pain receptors' activity, and adjusts the speed of the intake to it. _I_ can't do that." He rested his hands on his chest for emphasis. "So I set it to manual mode and-" He snapped his fingers. "Boom– all in one shot. Thing wrung you out like a sponge up to your shoulder." He finished wrapping Jack's arm and slung it on the bench flippantly. Jack hissed in pain, but he could tell the surgeon had been wounded, in his pride at least.

"But what does an old _slakter_ know, right?" he muttered, typing in a few keys into the machine. It whirred to life, growling and sputtering like an animal as the blood in the canister began to drain down into its depths. "It's going to take a minute to get the results," he said. Jack groaned and pressed a palm to his pounding forehead, grimacing halfheartedly at Sigg, who put his hands in his pockets and tipped his head to the side, smirking at his misery. Jack noticed that the smirk didn't reach his eyes. They were unreadable.

"But hey," he chirped, rooting through another cabinet. "There is a bright side-" He shoved something small and cardboard into Jack's free hand. "-the pigheaded get juice." Jack gave a withering look at the juicebox and then at Sigg. The amused look disappeared from the surgeon's face.

"And- if you're pigheaded _enough,_ you'll pass out from low blood sugar," he growled. "Drink it." Jack glared at him and begrudgingly fumbled with the straw. When he finally managed to get it in the box, he took a sip and gagged. It was sugary to a toxic degree, and tasted only theoretically of fruit, but he choked it down nonetheless. Sigg looked like he was watching the funniest thing on earth, and Jack honestly couldn't blame him. He must have been a pretty ridiculous sight, and the thought only made him finish it faster.

"There," he said, throwing the accursed thing in a waste basket. "Satisfied?"

"Immensely," Sigg said, grinning from ear tuft to ear tuft. Jack wanted to deck him. "Now," he said, turning back to the machine. A long piece of paper was feeding out of a slot in its side, and Jack saw that it was covered with medical jargon. Sigg tore it neatly out of the machine and pored over it, leaning on the counter and feeling for his notepad and the binder of patient information. Jack let his eyes fall shut while he worked, wanting nothing more than to just sleep.

"Well, you're anemic, and deficient in nearly everything- big shock- and your blood sugar is abysmal even before the test; I'm shocked you aren't a diabetic..." The surgeon rambled through a slew of statistics and percentages that Jack didn't understand, and he took a moment to let his mind go blank, leaning back against the wall. His arm still felt like it had been stretched like a rubber band, and wrathful pins and needles felt like they were going to eat through to bone, though they had been subsiding for a time now. The headache stayed put, much to Jack's chagrin.

"...-ite blood cell count is low, but since you're 25, you shouldn't need a supplement if you-" Jack's eyes flew open and he sat ramrod straight on the bench, exhaustion and dizziness forgotten. Sigg started, ceasing his babbling and blinking confusedly at him. Jack felt like he had been struck. Even Sigg began to look concerned after a few heartbeats of silence. More particularly, the surgeon looked alarmed at the look he must have been wearing.

"..What?" Jack said. His voice was low and hoarse. Sigg stared at him, brows knitting, and his russet eyes flickered back to the printout in confusion.

"Um- your blood count is point seven percent below-"

" _No,"_ Jack hissed. "I never told you how old I am." Sigg blinked, looking to be at a loss. He glanced, wide-eyed at the paper again and scratched behind a head feather.

"Uh, I-" he stammered. "You didn't have to. It's all right here." Sigg waved the paper in the air and Jack snatched it away from his talons before he could utter another word. The surgeon yelped, drawing back his hand as if he'd been burned. "It's true!" he squawked. "I swear. Chemical levels, hormones, hemoglobin, it's all there." Jack glared at him from the bench. "Y- you're twenty-five years old– it's right there on the paper. Look if you don't believe me." Jack balked, bringing the paper almost to his nose to read the minuscule print. Much of it was impossible names of chemicals or some other jargon that Jack couldn't understand, and his eyes stung when he realized how little he truly did understand.

Why was he still like this? He had been here for years and years and he had refused to learn, and now he knew nothing when it meant _everything._ His eyes pried through jungles of fibrinogen, leucocytes, aqueous... The nonsense disappeared as Jack's vision blurred with hot, angry tears. It was useless.

Finally, he spotted it. _Plasma levels: 51% Subject age approx. 304 mo._ The words didn't move, but to Jack, they were spinning. The room was all dead air to Jack. He felt like he was underwater. He felt like he had already drowned. He couldn't make his lungs move.

 _Subject age approx. 304 mo._

 _304 mo._

 _No,_ Jack thought as the floor slanted. _**"No."**_ He was suddenly on the shores of the lake, watching the old rook fly away over the trees and fearing his own mortality, but then the rook was right in front of him, flapping its ragged gray wings and crowing raucously. The hoarse calls twisted into a cruel, throaty guffaw. It spread its beak wide, laughing harder and staring at him all the while with a beady eye. To Jack's horror, all its feathers began to slide off its body like dead leaves. More and more gray and black feathers littered the ground and surf at his feet until only stark, white bones hovered in the air before him, and Jack had gone silent with horror.

Staring into the empty sockets, the realization finally struck Jack like lightning. Years and years had already gone by. The rook was dead. He was not. He had never gotten close.

The rook in front of him was growing feathers now, white ones. They poured out of its skull and down its ribs in silken cascades. All the years of feeling funny. All that time spent wondering when he would start to ache in the morning. Jack saw sharp teeth prick up out of the thin jaws. Bone ground against bone as the rook twisted to stare emptily into Jack's eyes, and to his horror it began to speak.

" _As you are,"_ it croaked. _"I was. As I am,"_ Jack shuddered, seeing the wind whip around its thin feathers to expose the bare ribs beneath. Its voice was familiar now. _"You will be."_

Pale skin stretched over its beak and crimson eyes appeared in the sockets, bright with fear. Both of Jack's hands appeared as well, wrapped around its throat. Reality bled back and Jack realized that that was exactly what he had done. His whole body felt numb as he lifted the kicking, choking surgeon off the floor by his neck. Raw terror contorted his face, beak curling up at the edges around fangs in feral panic. Jack felt his racing pulse against the sleight of his hand where he was trying to crush his windpipe. _This can't be real,_ he thought. But he knew the spell had passed, and the pain in his arms told him this wasn't an illusion.

Both their arms were slick with Jack's blood where Sigg had cut him open, goring at his arms with his talons in an attempt to get away. Long slashes dribbled blood onto the tile.

He brought Sigg close to his face until the tip of his beak was barely an inch from his nose, forcing the alien to look into his eyes.

"Tell me," he murmured. His voice sounded like a stranger's. "Look into my eyes, see what I've seen, and you tell me how old I am." The surgeon froze, grip clawing into the skin of Jack's arms. Horror was all he saw in those chestnut eyes. He had no answer, though his mouth was opening and closing in desperate cries. After an age, sound returned to him.

" _-irty! Twenty! Nineteen at least– oh, God, let me go!"_ Jack blinked, and blinked again. Awareness finally returned to him, washing into his body like a flood of icy water, and he gasped, dropping Sigg in shock. The surgeon scrambled across the floor and grabbed madly for his gun, suddenly towering over Jack like a pale building when he shot off the tile. He pointed the pistol dead on target between Jack's eyes, but he was still trembling as he had been before when he had threatened Jack with it. His eyes were wide, and terrified like a child's, but Jack knew it was only partly because of him. He realized then that the surgeon hadn't ever pulled the trigger. He had the look to him; that he was anything but prepared to destroy what he was aiming at.

Jack made no move to stop him. He just stood there, staring into some middle distance that the surgeon's eyes couldn't see. All the lifeless savagery seemed to have gone from him, and now there was nothing but grief in his gaze.

"I'm sorry," he said hollowly, staring at Sigg, who hadn't turned him away. His vision blurred at the animal terror that was still there. He had put it there. Jack said it again, and again, not really feeling like he was speaking at all. The surgeon still pointed the gun at him, staring listlessly. He whimpered when Jack moved to pick up the chart that had fallen on the tile, but still didn't pull the trigger.

Years. Years had gone by and he hadn't noticed. He hadn't noticed anything because there wasn't anything to notice. No mystery pains. No gray hairs. No change or soul crushing realization that he couldn't run as fast or jump as high as he once could. The carbon printed number mocked him silently, cast-iron as all the other information on the page. Arguments boiled up and died in his throat; maybe the machine had malfunctioned. Maybe Sigg had stuck the wrong arm. Maybe the computer had misread, or Sigg had misread, but his true age, he knew, was going to be nowhere on that printout. His hands trembled so hard the paper fell back to the floor with a sighing sound.

He wasn't aging.

"Run it again," he muttered, eyeing Sigg. "Run the diagnostics again, on this arm this time. I'll do it your way." Jack trudged to the bench and sat down, holding his good arm out beneath the machine without fear. "Please." His voice wavered, and though most of the terror looked to be subsiding from the surgeon's eyes, he still gave him the look that was more crushing to him than any scathing remark that he had said that night. Sigg, with the pistol still pointed straight and true at his head, was looking at Jack with cold, furious pity.

"Please," he said, looking for all the world like he was about to break down. "Please. That _can't_ be right, it just can't." Sigg didn't move, still staring at him with that horrible expression. Grief and rage suddenly crashed into Jack, and he pounded the bench with his fist.

" _Run it again, dammit!"_ Two loud sounds like thunder rang out in the room, and white pain exploded in Jack's leg, like he had been splintered apart below the knee. The world felt like it had been thrown into slow-motion as he stared at Sigg blankly. The surgeon was still holding his gun and looking terrified when he fell off the bench. He didn't feel himself hit the floor, but the surgeon sprung into action, grabbing a needle out of his pocket and leaping halfway across the room until he was crouched over Jack.

Talons poked his back as Sigg forced him on the ground with one hand, and Jack felt the needle jab his neck as he scrambled for his gun. "I'm sorry too," Sigg said, tone unreadable. Jack screamed nonsensically at the surgeon in a rage, lashing out blindly as Sigg threw his body on top of Jack's and grabbed both of his arms. He folded them behind his back, immobilizing him. Jack thrashed against his grip, trying to get away, but the pain in his leg seemed to fill his body like a basin, and he felt heavier with every second as the morphine coursed through his veins. Soon, even the pain dulled and he felt too heavy to move. He was tired. He was so, so tired.

The surgeon was still trembling when Jack went under.

* * *

 **A/N:** YES, I know birds don't gray with age but it was for symbolism, blah blah. Ugh I'm glad I got this over with. I wasn't too heavy on revisions so if there's mistakes I'm sorry. I was sick of working on this chapter; it was a long one. Don't worry though, things will start moving faster in the next couple. I would say I'm only two or three away from being finished with the fic.

I imagine the forest he was stuck in was the southern part of Siberia, which I think is the world's largest forest. I'm sorry the medical equipment isn't all futurey or whatever but the truth is I'm pretty bad at the creativity thing when it comes to machines :0 plus Sigg is a backalley doctor, so I imagine a lot of his gear being pretty 'ancient' anyway. Nothing is really exactly the same as any equipment we use, though; It would be kind of impossible for everything to magically end up identical, but if a method works, use it I guess.

Capri Sun is gross, eh Jack?


	3. The Lying Eyes

His head was pounding.

It was sound that first came back to Jack; not sight. Tinny clinking and the loud whoosh of the air in his lungs gradually worked to lull him out of his sleep, threatening to break the muddy line that separated coherence from nothingness. He tried to stay there, appreciating the numb feeling he got when he wasn't awake enough yet to worry about things. But soon, thoughts did begin to prod at Jack, and he wondered why his senses hadn't returned with them. Breathing certainly felt very difficult.

 _Wait!_ He thought. _I can't feel my legs!_ As Jack tried to move, he realized all of him was numb. The vague feel of fabric was on his skin, but other than that his very flesh felt cold and nonexistent. Muted panic coursed weakly through him, and he opened his eyes only to be too dazzled by the light to see where he was. Green spots pockmarked the back of his eyelids. A garbled noise of frustration and pain bubbled up in his throat as he fought through the mire to roll on his side. It took mammoth effort to make his limbs move, and even when they did, they felt leaden and unresponsive. Indeed, it felt like he had been encased in cold tar.

Suddenly, he felt a pressure on his chest and he was on his back again. A brash voice snapped at him from somewhere, sounding far away and very close at the same time, and he could only groan again in response. Setting his wits, he tried again, opening his eyes slowly this time. Blinding light still flooded his vision, but he grit his teeth and tried to keep them open even when they began to burn. This time, there was color to some of the haze, but he squeezed them shut again when barbs of pain began to needle the back of his skull. The clinking sounds had stopped, and now the silence in the room was pressing and worrisome. He had to wake up.

Groaning again, Jack fought to sit up, but again he was forced back down and the voice chastised him a second time, angrier than before. It sounded like someone shouting through a wall.

" _... -down! … -it slow..."_ Jack tried to form a retort, focusing much too hard on speaking than he should have had to. The result was a hoarse growl that sounded like 'oh.' He had actually meant to say 'no,' but his mouth felt like it was full of rocks, and talking around them was near impossible. A whirring sound filled his ears as his weight shifted upward, and he could tell he wasn't laying down all the way anymore.

Finally, Jack opened his eyes, and the color suddenly had edges to it, and they didn't warp and bend like the stunted chaos of a dream. He was sitting up in a bed against the wall of a dim room. His body felt impossibly heavy and numb, and even his lungs were taught and difficult to fill with air. There was a dull pain in his leg, but he knew it would only be worse later. Grudgingly, he shut his eyes again and groaned, trying to shake the fog that seemed to be swamping his mind. A small sound caught his attention and when he looked, there was Sigg, sitting near the foot of the bed.

The surgeon's arms were folded as he stared impassively at Jack, brows knitted in a frown. The fear he remembered was gone from his eyes, and only cold indifference remained. On a rolling table in front of him was a shallow tray and Sigg's pistol, its stout presence sucking what little air Jack could breathe out of the room. He looked away. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw Sigg sit a little taller. His outward fear may have been gone, but he could still see the way the feathers on his head twitched, how his chair was nearer to the door, and how he was hunched forward, pent up and ready to run. The inside of the tray was red, that was all Jack saw before he turned his head. He didn't want to look at any of it, including Sigg.

"It isn't loaded," the surgeon said. Jack inwardly recoiled at the loathing in the his voice. It seemed to hang in the air as pause stretched between the two of them, and the man's memory slowly began to return to him. The blood test. His age. The outburst. Gunfire.

"You..." Jack rasped, startled at how hoarse his voice was. "You _sot_ me!" Sigg blinked, and dry anger suddenly washed through Jack along with frustration at how his words still slurred. With some effort, he managed to heave himself into a wobbly sitting position to take a better breath. _"You sth-shot me!_ You shot me in the _leg!"_ Sigg uncrossed his arms, rearing back slightly. In a flash he had produced another syringe, brandishing it almost casually in his right hand.

"This isn't morphine," he said, voice wavering horribly as his eyes pinned. Jack only scoffed, forcing his words past the numbness in his mouth.

"Ah, f-fuck it's not, you spinelesth vulture! You- you wanna kill someone, you finiss- you finish the job! You don' shoot 'em in the leg like a damn boar and then chang' your mind!" Jack roared. It was rare that he cursed, but with all the anger and anesthetic in his body, he honestly couldn't care less. Sigg shot out of his chair, face contorting in an anger he couldn't find words for, and his grip tightened on the syringe.

"You want to test that theory?" he growled. His voice still shook, but now Jack couldn't tell if it was because of fright or anger. Beneath his own rage, a small twinge of fear made his stomach jump, but he tamped it down.

"I came to you for _help."_ His eyes burned. "I would have given you every credit I had. I _begged_ you." Sigg relaxed his stance a bit, going from enraged to that strange hollow mask he tended to slip into. He seemed to be practiced in appearing emotionless. Jack supposed he had to be.

"And _I-"_ he said, so coldly that it silenced Jack, "warned you! I made it very clear how I work— in and out! No nonsense! You play by _my_ rules! This is my life we're talking about!" Jack balked, mouth falling open for a moment.

"And it's _**mine!"**_ he howled, launching off the bed a bit too fast. A twinge sped up his leg and his head swam from standing so suddenly. He smacked a hand down on the rolling table for support. The bullet inside the tray rolled to the edge, leaving a threadlike trail of blood. Sigg's pistol clattered to the floor, and the surgeon's eyes flickered to it for a moment before returning to Jack.

"You think you're the only one walking on eggshells in this world?! Every day— every day! I wake up and wonder if I'm going to live to see the sun set again. I could fill a book, no— a _hundred_ books with how many times I've brushed death! I've been set up, shot at, and beaten senseless more times than you could ever dream of! I've been impaled. I've been burned, I've been _eaten,_ I lived through heatstroke, starvation, and hypothermia on multiple occasions. I've been possessed. I've been hunted like a dog and left for dead. My planet has been so razed and warped by time and tyranny that sometimes I wonder if it was ever different! Believe me, Sigg, or crime lord, or whatever the hell you are, you know nothing about what your _life_ is." Jack fell onto the edge of the bed, trembling and exhausted from his tirade, and buried his head in his hands.

"And now, I- I'm seeing horses in the walls." They were both quiet for a long time after that. Sigg sunk into his chair, setting the syringe on the table and pinching his brow. He couldn't keep back a heavyhearted sigh. Jack had fallen completely silent.

"Fifty-eight," he whispered, so quietly that he couldn't hear himself over the lump in his throat. "I'm fifty-eight." The silence that followed was the most suffocating yet. Jack could feel Sigg's eyes on him, but he honestly didn't care. Despite himself, a few angry tears managed to leave his eyes. He could feel them against his palms. Roughly, he swiped them away and settled on staring at his leg instead. There was no cast or casing, but he assumed the wounds had already been stitched; even mended. The lump in his throat refused to budge, though. He still wanted to hang on to at least a sliver of his dignity that hadn't already been lost. Sigg was sitting down, that he could tell, but he kept his eyes trained forward. He didn't want to look at the creature that surely believed he was insane. He didn't know why he was even yelling; it was hopeless.

"You're certain there's no room for error with that machine?" he muttered, glancing at Sigg finally. The surgeon was sitting with his elbows on his knees, hands folded. His face was creased in a contemplative frown, but otherwise still unreadable, if faintly sad. He suddenly rubbed at his neck, wincing in pain, and a wave of hot shame made Jack's stomach turn. He had never, _never_ lashed out at anyone like that.

"No," Sigg said, shaking his head. "No, there's- it's your biological statistics. There's no error. Seven months difference, tops." Jack's heart sank. It wasn't possible.

Sigg was rambling, now; going on about biomarkers and glucose levels, but Jack heard none of it. In his mind, he wasn't sitting in a makeshift exam room tucked away in a slum of a place he had once called Norway; another name that had been swept up in the nameless, wild chaos of Aku's rule. He wasn't in a world where machines could take your blood and turn it into jargon that spat lies. He wasn't in this land of insanity and steel. No, he was in a sea of black and white, falling through a stream that had ripped Jack from his life and— he now realized— his _death_ as well. He wanted to throw up.

"Do you have a test that can tell whether someone is losing their mind?" he whispered. Sigg made an amused 'hn!' sound in the back of his throat, but Jack could hear the poorly-concealed anger that still buzzed in his tone. The sound of feathers drifting on tile and a cabinet opening reached his ears, but he didn't move. Not until he felt claws poke his shirt as Sigg laid a hand on his back. The towering creature grabbed him by the shoulders and looked, really looked, into Jack's eyes, face stony with concentration. Jack squirmed uncomfortably, but the surgeon only tightened his grip. Jack winced at the talons digging through his shirt. Sigg was still poring over his eyes as if they were a puzzle.

"Fifty-eight," he said. "You're _sure."_ Jack blinked in surprise, and nodded eagerly. The smallest wisp of hope lit in his chest. until he evidently surmised the situation. "Memories, people, birthdays- all of it?" the surgeon pressed. Jack frowned and dipped his head again in a nod. There was something in the surgeon's tone he didn't like.

"I've been here for over thirty years already," he said edgily. Sigg's face remained impassive. "Judging by how you're taking this, I would assume you've been here for less." Sigg suddenly let go of Jack's shoulders and tossed something at him, and he started as the speckled medical gown hit his face. It was like Sigg hadn't even heard his concealed question.

"Here," the surgeon said. "You'll need this. You should be able to walk on your leg now." Jack blinked, Sigg's avoidance to answer him forgotten. The tone of the surgeon's voice shocked him; it had turned uncharacteristically grave. His face was no longer contorted in anger, or even confusion, but it had slipped back into that strange, empty expression. For some reason, that was all the more unsettling to Jack.

"Where are we going?" he said warily, making a wobbly attempt at standing. True to Sigg's word, there was only a dull ache in his leg, and the longer he stood, the more the pain ebbed. His head was pounding a little less now too. The anesthesia must have been wearing off.

"We're trying something else," the surgeon said, rummaging through a drawer. "I don't think an eye test is what you need." He fetched the biblical binder of patient files from the drawer. Jack had forgotten about it. He suddenly stumbled and grabbed at the bed railing, steadying himself. As he frowned at his uncooperative legs, the grip of his gun suddenly appeared in front of him. He looked up to see Sigg handing him his pistol— surely unloaded— and the surgeon shrugged, offering a half-smile. The weird feeling in Jack's gut only got worse when he holstered the gun, and it worsened when Sigg led him out another door. Through another dark haunt.

As the two of them walked in silence, Jack realized with a twist in his stomach that he was dreadfully scared. There had been something in Sigg's voice and eyes just then that was almost mournful; it made Jack feel like the surgeon knew something he didn't. He wrung the gown that was in his hands, thoughts about what Sigg had in mind swirling in his head like an young storm. What was he hoping to find? Or worse— confirm? By the din of his voice earlier, Jack knew with a sinking feeling that the surgeon still didn't believe him about his age. So what else, then? The barrage of questions and the growing unease at what was to come only made Jack regret this visit all the more as they passed more closed doors.

When the two of them had left the infirmary, Jack had felt sick. By the time they reached the imaging room, he felt like he couldn't breathe.

 **A/N:** Uh, yeah, not liking this one much.. I just hope this chapter is still ok despite me only revising it and not completely rewriting it. Actually I cut out an entire flashback bit I'm going to be using it for a oneshot spin-off after this is complete. I really wish I hadn't have pulled the whole gunshot thing into this. I kinda pulled that plotline out of my a$$ honestly because I thought it would be more realistic that Sigg would have been scared out of his wits by Jack. I was rereading the first draft and it was a lot better in my opinion, so I tried to work in some of it here, but I still bloody hated writing this chapter. Listening to Fantasia on Christmas Carols helped a little tho

watch?v=wdxZhmylG-I (Vaughan Williams is life)

If you're thinking I forgot about the fact Jack's arms got filleted by Sigg or that /two gunshots/ is seeming less severe than they should, don't worry. :) There's a very good reason for this. I wanted to have Sigg tell Jack off about how he made him do /something/ but I COULDN'T because of the same reason ugh. It's going to be brought to light in that spin-off though don't worry :)

The next few chapters are probably going to be shorter just because there are more stopping points and it's (thankfully) going to be moving a little faster now. It should have two more with an epilogue, unless I make one tiny-ish one in the middle. Idk, it'll all come down to how I feel about the pacing, but the next one should be out relatively quickly. (Can you believe I drafted this monster all the way back in June, oof) I've been looking forward to the next one for a while so it should be out a lot sooner I promise.


	4. Fall

Among all the machines Jack had encountered, _this_ one had to be the most deplorable. The man winced as the table shuddered underneath him, the dull growl coming to a sudden halt as an even more awful clanging picked up. He eyed the walls nervously as if they would come apart at the noise and tried to keep from squirming. As soon as it began, the clanging stopped too, and a small knocking noise came from somewhere in the machine's bowels. Only the underlying chirps and and a low, staticky hum droned as the bore began to spin again. The little green lights were coming around.

Jack tried just to look at the mirror in the roof of the alcove. It had been tilted so you could see out the rim of the bore, and he squinted at the digital clock on the far wall. 6:48 AM. No more hopes of squeezing an hour of sleep in. Jack sighed exasperatedly, letting his eyes wander. Below the clock, Sigg was sitting at his desk behind the control room window. The alien eyed him for a moment, craning slightly above a monitor before he went to jotting more notes down.

The surgeon had made a writing fool of himself again while handling this song and dance. Jack would be surprised if the surgeon didn't have at least a small novel on him already. The chirping had been going on for a long time as the inner wall made its slow orbit, but the clock had only just ticked up to 6:49. Jack took a shaky breath and forced a second half-frustrated sigh. It was a desperate attempt to relieve the tight panic in his chest, but even after that, it still felt like he was holding his breath. Jack hated that feeling.

Lying this still, another force of equal power was warring with his unease. Aside from the brief 'nap' Sigg had given him, he had slept less than twelve hours in the past two days.

Jack had trouble sleeping as it was, but for two days he had been on the road, coming from somewhere east of where he was now. He couldn't remember who had tipped him off that there was a good street surgeon in the New Oslo Citadel, but he had remembered seeing Sigg's face a few years before, either on a television screen or in a newspaper. He couldn't remember which, or why he had been in there anyway. Regardless, he had made the journey; sitting on that stupid bike until he was bowlegged and worn down. It had still felt good to have a set goal again though, and he had all but torn up the road getting to the city. The first night, Jack drove until dawn and didn't stop to rest until he caught himself in the grass where he'd drifted off the pavement.

The bore was still spinning, scanning and humming along with the chirps deeper inside the machine, and Jack felt the exhaustion dragging on him. His eyelids felt leaden. As much as he tried to fight it, all the racket slowly began to lull him, and his eyes closed at some point. His mind turned to static.

 _EEEEEEEEEEE, EEEEEEEEEEE, EEEEEEEEEEE, EEEEEEEEEEE._ Jack started so bad the paper wrinkled underneath him, gasping sharply as panic strung up his chest again. The drum had stopped rotating, and this new noise was earsplitting on an ungodly level. It felt like waves of the sound were lapping against his skull like water, radiating from every angle in the narrow tube. Amidst the racket, Jack vaguely heard Sigg chiding him, telling him to be still, but his mind was too iced up with panic.

His lungs spasmed, trying desperately to keep the air in his chest and his skin itched with the prickles of a cold sweat. Were the walls closer to his arms? The noise kept on, and Jack gripped at the edge of the table, trying to steady his thoughts. He was a warrior. He was his father's son.

But– his mind debated. There was one thing he _wasn't,_ and it was fond of small spaces; especially small spaces that shot magnet waves into your skull and sounded like a buzzsaw. The screeching suddenly keened up into one shrill, metallic scream that was somehow even louder. Jack broke, chest heaving as he grasped for air. He had to get out of this death trap.

The man desperately punched his thumb at the distress button that had stayed locked in a clammy grip at his side, wheezing in relief when the atrocious noise sputtered out. The table shuddered and began to chug out of the mouth of the bore on its tracks, though the machine's ever-beating heart still chirped away, keeping the magnets cold. Once he was able, Jack scrambled out of the machine and sat up on the bed, trembling. He could breathe.

" _Arggh!"_ Sigg's furious growl crackled over the speaker in the dim room as Jack shakily drank in air. "This is the third time you've hit your panic switch! Get a grip or I'm going to take it away, I swear..."

Jack shook his head and dangled his legs off the side of the bench. Sweat was running down his back, making his clothes stick. He shivered. The imaging lab was freezing, and the papery gown Sigg had insisted he wear was no help whatsoever.

"Look," the voice buzzed again. "I'm serious. Whatever... _this_ _–_ _"_ he gestured through the window at Jack, waving a clawed hand like he did. "–is, you're going to have to cut it out. Act like the guy I see in the tabloids. People have _conniption fits_ over you." Jack rolled his eyes.

"Now, I don't care how ancient that thing is. Sigg jabbed a claw toward the machine. "We're doing this if I have to strap you to the damn table."

Jack glared at him through the glass. This was humiliating. Sigg's strange, somber mood had passed once they had reached the imaging lab, and his usual coarseness was back with a vengeance.

"You could at least give me some kind of ear protection," he rasped, scowling dejectedly at the technician room. The surgeon scoffed behind the plate glass.

"I can afford the MRI scanner or I can afford earplugs. I cannot possibly afford both." Jack growled under his breath, looking downcast at the linoleum. He heard Sigg's chair roll as the surgeon returned to the monitor to reset the machine.

Jack's head was still a swirling soup of emotions as he stared at the floor. He supposed he should have been happy to be immortal; now he could pore over every stone in the world for a way home for a century if he needed to, but the idea was also horrifying. He felt inhuman. In many ways, this night had been almost as crushing as the morning after the rams. Almost. This hadn't ended in murder.

As Jack stared at the floor, he noticed something odd. He blinked, wondering why it hadn't registered in his mind before now.

"Sigg," he murmured. The surgeon didn't look up from his notes. "Why..." Jack blinked almost catatonically at the ground, mind slipping into a blank. He struggled to form the words as sudden calmness stole over him. It numbed his senses, turning his words into into strung out things he had to scramble to tie together. The chips and cracks in the tile hypnotized him, and he had to force them out. "... What... happened to the floor?"

Sigg hadn't appeared to have heard him. The lanky surgeon stood from his desk and crossed the control room, lugging his binder along as he opened the steel door marked 'IMAGING'.

"I'm going to check in case the scanner got enough data. Don't go anywhere." He paused, door in hand, and pointed at Jack with narrow eyes. "And _don't_ break my machine. It may be old, but it still costs more than the bounty on your head," Sigg turned and ducked out of sight into the dark processing lab, as he had done twice before, and Jack was left alone in the dim room.

Jack shook his head, along with the haze that had come over him. Whatever he had been thinking about disappeared from his mind as his eyes returned to the floor. There had been something strange he'd noticed, but the more he tried to remember what it was, the faster it slipped out of his reach. The tiles were smooth and pristine like the rest of Sigg's wing.

The omniscient chirping from the MRI scanner seemed louder now that Jack was alone. He sighed, closing his eyes and pushing his sullen thoughts away before he slid off the table. He walked dejectedly across the linoleum to a few shelves on the far wall. A strip of red tape on the floor was marked 'CAUTION : MAG. FIELD – NO METAL BEYOND THIS POINT.'

Jack pulled his normal clothes off the shelf and changed out of the hospital gown, crumpling it up and throwing it on the floor in a childish attempt at making himself feel better. A half-second later, he was folding over the back of a chair out of guilt. He sank down into the chair, putting his head in his hands. He was about finished with this whole ordeal. If Sigg came out and said the scans were unusable, he would merely stand up, say thank you, and hot-foot it to the nearest bar. The surgeon obviously thought he was crazy, so it was gospel to Jack at this point.

His eyes landed on a corner of the ceiling that was discolored, watching as rainwater dripped onto a puddle on the tile. The storm had passed by now, but beneath the din of the scanner Jack could barely hear the rain. He wouldn't ask for his money back; he had the blood work. Still, after everything else, part of him just wanted to leave Sigg in the dust and never look back.

Still, Jack couldn't help but wonder if the surgeon would even let him. He had seemed oddly insistent with his treatments from the beginning, but Jack couldn't imagine why. Sigg was certainly a strange "criminal" indeed. Jack figured maybe it was to ensure he had enough to pay for, but he wasn't sure.

He had about fainted when he had first caught sight of the great hulking machine in the imaging room. It wasn't even moving yet and Jack had already heard its horrendous, chirping racket. Sigg had begun rambling away that the noise was just nitrogen pumps and something about magnets, but Jack had just stood there with the blood draining out of his face.

Sigg must have been insane. Absolutely crazy. The surgeon was babbling obliviously about the scanner's rotating bore and _'oh, how wonderful it is that this thing has a rotating bore; it only takes thirty minutes and oh, the_ resolution...'

Jack didn't know why Sigg yammered on about how old the thing was if he also talked about it like it was some wondrous instrument. He hadn't stopped rambling until Jack had just turned to him and flatly said "No." As per his prediction, that hadn't been an option.

Sigg almost had to wrestle him onto the table the first time, and that was after the muscle relaxers. Before the first scan, Sigg had injected a concoction of narcotics and imaging dye into his arm, and Jack was still nauseated from it. The drugs were supposed to calm him down, Sigg said, but his first scan attempt had lasted just under two minutes. It took almost another hour and all the grudging reassurance Sigg could manage to get him on the table again. The second scan lasted seven-and-a-half, but Sigg said it was still incomplete. Jack had lasted eighteen minutes this time, and he hoped to Gods it was enough. He couldn't take this any longer.

A muffled slam took Jack out of his thoughts, and he turned to see Sigg crossing the control room to the monitor, arms full of black plastic sheets. Rather than sit down, he hunched over the back of his chair and typed something rapidly on the keys, piping up on the intercom.

"Well, today's your lucky day," he said, and Jack felt his chest unknot. A breath he didn't know he'd been holding flew out of him as the surgeon finished whatever he'd been typing and flipped a switch on the console. A monitor on the far wall of the MRI room lit up blue, and the steel door fell shut as Sigg came sauntering out. The black sheets, a huge folder, and his binder of charges logged his arms, and he set everything down on a table before before Jack could help him.

"I thought there were no computers here," he said, walking to meet Sigg at the monitor. The surgeon shook his head, waving off the remark with a flick of his talons. Jack's brow furrowed at the shortness, but anticipation won over his confusion.

"So..?" he said. Sigg smiled, puffing up.

"Well, you may have terminated your scan– again– but you managed to keep still long enough to get your whole brain in the cross-section." Sigg opened the folder and tapped in the screen with a talon. The blue disappeared, and in its wake appeared a myriad of strange images. Jack blinked.

They were incomplete, each of them coming to a streaky halt at the spine; where he'd hit the panic button, Jack assumed. Half of them were brightly colored and half were monochrome, but he immediately recognized what they were, and an odd mix of disturbance and awe came over him.

 _So_ you're _what's been giving me so much trouble._

"Is that..." Jack pointed at the monitor and looked at Sigg, who nodded in earnest, folding his arms with all the egotistical doctor-pride his frame could hold.

"Yep," he said, tapping a talon on the screen. "That's you." Jack stared at the brain scans in unsettled fascination, and despite everything that had happened, a ghost of a smile flitted across his face. It really was kind of amazing.

"The future isn't as bad if you let it help," Sigg said softly. He was facing away from Jack now, rummaging through notes and poring over his scans. Jack let the surgeon alone for a moment, turning back to the images. The closest thing to contentedness he'd felt that night needled at his mind, which was still drowned in grief and fear, but it was enough. Right now, it was enough.

"Diagnostics will start running in a minute." Sigg tapped on a black and white scan and it blew up to fill the screen. His face creased in concentration as he began to scribble more notes down. Other than the pensive expression, Jack noticed he had slipped back into that emotionless state he favored when he was working. Jack still stared at the details of the scan, taken aback by just how far the world had advanced without him, and a familiar splinter of ice pricked at his heart at the thought of his home. Would things turn out the same if he ever fulfilled his purpose? Would people a thousand odd years after his time still have these wonders if he removed Aku from the equation?

 _If,_ he thought sullenly. It struck him for the first time that the world may lose as much as it gained if he changed its course, and the realization was like a blow.

In the folds on that screen was his entire life; every broken bone, every sleepless night under an overpass, every moment of joy, or hatred, or sorrow, or love. Jack wrapped his arms around himself and shuddered. He he had never felt so small in his life. He was just folds and bones piloted by that _thing._ He couldn't save the world. His sword could, his father could, but he had spent his chance, and now he couldn't even save himself. He would be stranded here until he died. If he could ever _manage_ to die.

A lump rose in Jack's throat, and the screen blurred. He wondered why that thought had taken so long to form from the black, oily feeling that had sated in his gut since the incident with the rams. Before now, he had never truly believed that he couldn't complete his mission, but reality was sinking in, and it was cold. He had never felt so horrible.

"I never asked for this," Sigg said. "I never wanted to be a street surgeon." Jack blinked, eyes clearing up in surprise, though the lump in his throat stayed put. Sigg had spoken so softly he had barely heard him, and he had been too lost in thought to notice when the surgeon had initially stopped writing.

Jack's stomach clenched at the deep sorrow etching the alien's face. All traces of pride and bitterness had seemed to drain from his form, and even though he towered over Jack by a head, he looked small. His eyes looked aged; hollow and distant and... terribly sad. A new page of scribbled notations sat on the table. Jack only caught a few words like 'receding' and 'progressive.' There was a third word, but he didn't recognize it. Sigg slammed the notebook shut when he caught Jack reading, and alarm cloyed at his mind at the surgeon's hastiness. What was he trying to hide?

"I never wanted to be a street surgeon," he repeated, voice wavering. Jack was incredulous. Sigg's attitude had changed so drastically.

"I was a doctor. A _real_ doctor." He looked around the room, scanning the waterstained walls with empty eyes. "This is my hospital."

The surgeon was staring into some middle distance Jack couldn't see, remembering a past of his own with all the dazed moroseness of a sleepwalker. Sigg wrung his talons before they fell at his side, trembling.

"And then–" chills puckered the back of Jack's neck. The surgeon's voice was thunder. He followed Sigg's eyes to a line of bullet holes that ribboned out from behind a humors chart. "– then I got too good."

The scanner chirped, nitrogen hissing. Coils clanging. Jack's heart thudded in cadence. He was feeling more uncomfortable with each passing second.

"It's hope that Aku despises more than anything. I guess I learned that too late." The surgeon crossed the room to the damaged wall and ran his talons along the scorch marks. He sounded far away, like trying to recall a dream.

"They took no prisoners," he whispered.

Jack had been consumed with nothing but grief for himself just heartbeats ago, but now his mind wasn't full of thoughts rams and blood and time. He was thinking of empty rooms, of baby blankets in puddles. Of Sigg, who had to walk past ghosts and debris every night. It was sickening. No wonder the surgeon acted like he didn't see.

Jack looked sadly at Sigg, whose voice was wavering more and more. "I'm not a criminal, Jack. I'm not." Jack's breath caught in his throat. Sigg had used his name. "I wanted– I _want_ to help people." He shook his broad head, feathers swishing.

"But it's not the name. It's _nev–"_ Sigg stopped short, shoulders hunching as he put a hand over his mouth. Jack saw his wilted frame shudder as he swallowed. The surgeon took a deep breath and visibly calmed. "It's _never_ The same." He turned around to face Jack, whose stomach turned at the tears that rimmed his maroon eyes.

"I can't find the point anymore. No matter how hard I try, stitching up switchblade wounds will never be the same as saving a child from a brain tumor. There's no pride in that; there's no _honor_ in that! Rigg knows there's no _thanks."_ His voice broke on the last word, and tears began to cut even trails through the Sigg's face feathers. He rocked with tremors and a few hiccups slipped out from behind his talons. Slowly, he regained his composure. When he spoke again, his voice was barely more than a hoarse whisper. "I have no purpose anymore. I haven't done anything that matters in years."

Since he had first put the scans on the screen, the surgeon had kept his gaze anywhere but Jack's eyes, but now he stared right into them. Jack didn't know whether he was more afraid of what the surgeon was seeing in his eyes, or of what he was seeing in Sigg's. The sheer intensity of raw shame in the depths of them was enough to make Jack recoil, but there was also so much grief. The most surprising thing there though was the rage.

"I want to hate you. I want to hate you so _much."_ Jack blinked, feeling confusion and remorse at the sudden, hateful words.

"Why?" he said. His own voice was hoarse, warring with the lump in his throat. Sigg barked a humorless laugh, shaking his head like he had heard a joke.

" _'Why?'"_ Sigg jeered. "Why else would Aku suddenly get oh-so worried about having me _–_ another little fucking miracle worker running amok in his cesspool? That incredible brain surgeon in New Oslo who defies death with his _gifts."_ He spat the sentence like a curse, waving his talons through the air in mock appraise. Loathing leaded his voice. "That ring any bells, O Great Samurai Jack? You _ruined my life!"_ The surgeon heaved a breath, like the scathing words had fatigued him. Then, slowly, he sank down the razed wall and drew his knees up to his chest. The surgeon's shoulders shuddered as he put his head in his talons and sobbed.

Jack stood there, staring past the top of the surgeon's head and at nothing in particular. His hands were trembling by his sides, and no matter how much his eyes were burning he found he couldn't cry. Sigg had struck him dumb, and Jack supposed, vaguely, that he deserved that. He had never considered that even the _idea_ of him would be enough to ruin people's lives. The surgeon had fallen silent.

"But I can't hate you. Not all the way," he muttered, looking up at Jack from the floor. He looked frail, swimming in his lab coat. "I know it isn't your fault. You would never want anything like this." The statement did not make Jack feel even remotely better.

"Really, I know you have it a lot worse than me. All that stuff you said about what your life is, I know." Jack just blinked at him. He wasn't going to say what was on his mind. The surgeon continued, not noticing the hard look Jack shot him.

"All night I've been telling myself, 'Don't mess this up. Don't mess this up. This is someone you can really help,' but I did; I fucked things up, and I'm sorry. I'm so _sorry."_ The frown disappeared. Jack had been telling himself the same thing all night.

"You're like a kid, really," Sigg said, smiling sadly. His short face feathers were matted with tears. "Of all the things, I never expected that you would be like a kid. They got scared too." Sigg chuckled tearfully, and Jack felt a stab of remorse. The vice grip on his throat tightened.

"You're the first person I've treated in years who feels real," he said. "You actually feel like a part of my old life. You know I haven't used that thing in a year and a half?" He waved a hand sadly at the MRI scanner, not even looking up from the tile. Jack winced. The surgeon had been so irritable about that whole ordeal, micromanaging and talking about how old it was and how much it had cost. Now Jack saw why.

Sigg had intimidated him so much at first, with his appearance and demeanor, but now Jack saw how much of his coarseness had been walls, and how withered he looked now that they had crumbled. He hadn't put Jack through all of this because of his hatred, but because he cared. He cared enough to have hulking, powerful machines smuggled in or refurbished for who knew how much money. He cared enough to hole himself up in a crumbling building, risking his neck for strangers who hardly spoke to him. He cared enough to write whole volumes of notes by hand. He cared enough to keep his little wing of the world so stupidly clean it was strange. He wasn't a street surgeon; he wasn't a criminal.

No, he was just a surgeon. A surgeon named Sigg who had lost his way, and who had cared enough to help Jack. He knelt down to help him up, unsure of what else to do, but Sigg waved him off and stood, albeit shakily.

"Are you..." Jack trailed off. "Are you okay?" Sigg gave a suffering sigh and shook his head, waving him off again and trudging back to the table. Jack followed, standing behind the surgeon with his hands clasped behind his back. He didn't remotely know what he was supposed to do; he had never been good in situations like this. Having been alone for most of his life, there weren't a lot of times in the past when he had had to deal with the emotional crises of others, and the few times he had, it had carried out pretty similar to this. Jack actually felt like he tended to make things worse whenever he tried to console other people, and he decided he would let Sigg be for now.

The surgeon leaned heavily on the table, lighting another cigarette. Slowly, the lines in his narrow face shallowed. While Sigg took a moment, Jack tried to distract himself by looking at the scans some more, but they had disappeared behind a pop-up loaded with data like the blood test results. He recognized one word on the entire page, and that was 'diagnosis.' He thought being a doctor must require learning a completely different language. The word that followed was at least ten letters long. _Wait,_ he thought. _Diagnosis? Something's really wrong with me?_

Before Jack could feel a shock of panic, Sigg coughed and wiped his eyes, drawing his attention back.

"I'm sorry," he said. The tearfulness in his voice was gone, but so was his boorishness. What remained was a hollow, dead murmur. He almost sounded like a different person.

"I didn't mean to get carried away like that. It's not like I can do anything, anyway. The past is done." Jack frowned. The statement didn't offend him, but it was more like a bitter reminder.

"But you–" Wry light suddenly sparked in Sigg's eyes, and some of the cheek returned to his voice. "– you can fix that, can't you?" Jack blinked, floored. For a precious moment he had forgotten that the rest of the world had no idea about his sword, or that all the gaps in the timestream had been sealed. For a moment he had forgotten that he had shut himself off from civilization. Jack hoped he hadn't hesitated enough to give himself away, and plastered a weak smile on his face, nodding.

"Yes."

Sigg grinned darkly at him, nodding slowly, before sighing and shaking his head. He chuckled slightly, a coarse, disbelieving sound, and Jack knew he was busted.

"Wow," Sigg said. Baffled amusement tinged his voice, but Jack heard the underlying disappointment as well. "That was _terrible."_ He laughed that weird, unbelieving chuckle again, and Jack's heart sank.

"Good Rigg," Sigg said, smiling. "I really would have thought you would be more versed in lying by now, Hut and _Haldy..."_ Jack looked at the tile so Sigg couldn't see the look on his face. He had always thought maybe it would be relieving for someone else to finally know his situation, but instead of feeling the weight of it lighten, he felt vile. It was like his very morals had been peeled away to reveal the wretched, dishonest tar beneath.

The surgeon took a long drag of smoke and let his gaze wander. He looked like he was daydreaming. "You know," he said. "A lot of the time I really wish you would just get that over with."

Jack's breath caught in his throat. He heard his heartbeat in his ears, from astonishment or guilt or just from reeling at the _audacity–_

"That one day, I'd just be sitting here, reading the paper, processing x-rays..." He shook his head. Slowly, drunkenly. Inebriated on hope. "...and then, _poof–"_ He flicked his claws open, eyes wide and far away. "Everything would just..." Sigg stared dead on at him. _Justified audacity,_ Jack thought miserably.

"Stop." Bullets of sweat were running down Jack's neck, even though it was sixty-three degrees in the imaging room. He nodded slowly at the surgeon. Seeing this reality implode; no timestream to support its weight, was something he had been dreaming of witnessing for years. But still, something about the way Sigg talked unnerved him. How easily it was for the surgeon to say he wanted to disappear; to have never existed. It was like suicide. It was _worse_ than suicide.

An unsettling thought struck Jack that there were undoubtedly more like him; dying for him to finish what he had started and end whatever dismal hands had been dealt them. How many... how many had already succumbed to that desire? He shuddered.

"Hey, look," Sigg said. His tone had dipped into something that could almost pass as consoling. "I won't tell. You're only human, and the world owes you too much already." Jack stared at him, stomach clenched and eyes burning. Was that it? Was he just supposed to tuck tail and say 'I tried?' Just because he was _"only human?"_ He didn't know whether to be disheartened or furious. He still had a job and surrender was not an option. If giving his all meant getting himself killed, then so be it. He kept those thoughts secret, though. Sigg could believe what he wanted to believe about him. He just prayed that, one day, he might be able to prove the surgeon wrong.

Jack heaved a heavy sigh, letting his eyes fall shut, and they stung from exhaustion. If the surgeon had found something wrong with him, Jack realized his newest venture to find a physician would be over. He would be aimless again. He nodded in defeat, not bothering to defend himself any further. Sigg was wearing that weird look of pity again.

"Well," he said. "Whatever you're doing, I'm rooting for you, Jack." The despair at being found out dithered, chased away by a warm feeling that spread through him like thin fog over an ocean of grief. He smiled for real this time, even if it wasn't all happy. The surgeon smiled back, and held out a clawed hand.

"Sigga Kajar," he said. Jack's eyes widened. "I like to keep things casual between me and my _patients."_ Jack blinked at the surgeon in disbelief. He was touched. The surgeon got a far off look in his old eyes as they shook hands, and Jack knew that he was remembering.

Nervously, Jack hoped the surgeon wouldn't ask for his name, but, as if on cue, the alien's long head feathers twitched. Just barely. Jack started. He knew Sigg was waiting for the courtesy to be returned. He hadn't let go of Jack's hand. A sudden calm took him though, and he straightened, letting go of the surgeon's hand without a word. Sigg knew enough secrets.

The surgeon blinked a few times, and Jack thought he caught a glint of sadness in his eyes, but it was gone as quick as it had come. "'Guess that's fair," He said. There was no contempt in his voice. The jaws of tension had finally released them and seemed to free up the cold air of the imaging room, but even after all that, the guilt in Sigg's eyes hadn't faltered. Jack tried not to be worried by that.

Sigg suddenly turned, though, and grabbed something out of a cabinet before handing a vial of contrast agent to Jack.

"What– you think I can afford drinks?" he joked. Jack was shocked when he actually felt himself chuckle. He had laughed. A yellow, bubbly feeling filled his lungs, and he let himself chuckle again, and he teared up a little when he didn't have to force it. He was _laughing._ The surgeon smiled and raised his vial like a glass.

"To pariahs?" he said. Jack nodded.

"To pariahs." He felt a little more whole when he raised up that little glass vial.

Sigg's smile faltered, and finally died. A distant, wistful look clouded his face as he looked at the vial in his hands, and sighed. He sounded tired.

"How the mighty fall, huh?" he murmured. Jack could only stare before he gave the slightest nod in return.

"How the mighty fall."

Both of them were quiet after that, each digesting all that the other had said. Jack kept noticing that whenever he looked at the surgeon, his eyes would find the floor, staring at it with that guilt-ridden expression. Jack closed his eyes, dread creeping at his brief escape to contentedness, and took a deep breath. Preparing.

"Sigga," he said. The surgeon's head feathers pricked up. "Please look at me." Slowly, the surgeon turned his face up from the floor and fixed Jack in a gaze so deep with shame it was distressing.

"Yes?" For the first time since they had stepped in the room, Jack suddenly didn't notice the chirping of the MRI scanner. The jaws of tension were back, clamping down with ungodly force.

"What is schizophrenia?"

Jack would never forget such a silence.

The sky was lightening. Shadows in the city below slowly receded as the sun crawled slowly upward, and a dense black cloud bank carried its rain somewhere west. Cold wind whipped through the city and around the corner of the building, but Jack didn't feel it. The rust on the railing was biting into his hands. There was a brick on the far wall that was lighter colored than the rest, and for some reason that was all that had Jack's attention at the moment.

Vaguely, Jack thought he should feel something rather than nothing, but he didn't; he was numb. All he was feeling was the wrought iron in his hands and watched the sun rise. It wasn't as if he had been that surprised.

The long walk back to the fire escape was something Jack didn't remember, but he vaguely remembered what had come before. He could see himself and Sigg sitting in the technician room, having a one-sided conversation about symptoms, options, and medication. Jack had been hearing, but he hadn't been listening. He had felt like he wasn't actually part of the conversation, but rather sitting a little ways behind himself, watching some kind of sick soap opera play out. These were the things that were supposed to happen to other people. But then, Jack supposed, he was just someone else to everyone else. He was the most infamous man on earth, and he was still just someone else.

He did remember what Sigg had said about the disease, and he couldn't see himself ever forgetting it. If this schizophrenia truly worked the way the surgeon had explained, then he was in for it.

" _Now, I'm sure there are some chemical anomalies in the hippocampus here,"_ Sigg had said, pointing to a whitish smudge near the bottom of his scan. " _– which would explain your changes in behavior and thinking, but most of what's happening is in here."_ He switched to a different cross-section, this one from a bird's-eye view, and circled the white, cloudy middle of the scan. Jack raised his lip, repulsed at the image. He could see his eyeballs.

Needless to say, his fascination with the 'technological wonders' of the world had long gone, and now he found himself more loathing and sickened by them than ever. _"Now, these are your temporal lobes,"_ Sigg had said. " _– only, they aren't. This is a scan from a twenty-seven year-old man I tested for blood clots a few years back._ This– _on the other hand..."_ He grabbed a cel off of the counter next to him and held it up next to the first one, and Jack's stomach dropped to his feet.

Oh, _God._

Jack hadn't been able to tell before, because he had never seen one, but when Sigg held up the two images side-by-side, he saw immediately that there had to be some truth to what the surgeon was telling him. There were... _holes._

Jack shook his head violently, shuddering, trying to rid his head of the images, but they stayed cemented to the backs of his eyelids. That big, butterfly-shaped _gap_ in the middle and the deep crevices rimming the outer edges where it should have been all white. His stomach was roiling, and he tasted bile on the back of his tongue, but he forced it down, hoping it would stay.

" _Now,"_ Sigg had said softly. Jack had turned white as a sheet. " _This can affect many things, and... reality is one of them."_ he spoke slowly and gently, like he was consoling a child. Jack could spit in his face. " _And, I... and the passage of time can be..."_

The surgeon trailed off then, sighing and screwing his eyes shut as he ruffed the feathers on the side of his head in thought. Jack knew he was trying to be sensitive, and he suspected that it was very difficult to say what he had to say. He didn't have it in him to pity right then. The surgeon had wanted a real patient, so he could eat crow. Sigg suddenly straightened, though, fixing Jack once again in his professional, indifferent gaze.

" _Your perception of time has likely been skewed. You've probably got it built up in your mind that fifty years have passed since you were eight, but that isn't the case."_ Ah, this song and dance again. Jack had figured a while ago that there was no way Sigg had been on Earth very long, or he would know about the thirty-odd years of mayhem Jack had already caused. How old some of those wanted posters were.

Jack had just stared at the surgeon, equally impassve, and shook his head, slowly. After all this fuss, all this heartache, the creature of science still didn't believe him, and Jack was done trying to make him. As far as he cared, the surgeon could believe whatever he wanted.

Sigg had gone on talking then, and that was when it got fuzzy again for Jack because he had just been staring at that scan and trying not to vomit. He had been thinking about how he was evidently immortal now and how this disease would play a part in that. The horrifying thought of his brain withering away until he just dropped dead one day wouldn't leave his thoughts. It was almost too horrible to think about, but he didn't cry. He didn't have the energy anymore to cry.

Jack remembered when Sigg finally fell silent, realizing that he was just talking to the walls and that it had been long since Jack had heard enough. He remembered the weight of a rough, clawed hand squeezing his shoulder and the surgeon's tear-rimmed eyes not quite meeting his. Jack supposed the surgeon couldn't bear to. He had been donning that emotionless mask all throughout the night, but now he had let the walls down, and the most raw grief for Jack clouded his gaze and shimmered on the edge of his eyelids. His voice broke when he whispered, voice strained against the weight of a sob.

" _I am so, so sorry."_

Jack had just stared at him before he stood and walked out of the control room. Sigg let him. When he reached the door, he saw the surgeon's reflection in the cross-hatched window, hunched over the countertop that was covered in black and white lives, shuddering with his head in his talons. Slave to his work. His lot in life.

Jack hadn't turned back. Goodbyes always stung less when they were quick. The smallest inkling of guilt wormed through his gut when Jack realized he had never even said thank you.

Standing there, the inkling niggled and grew, quickly turning into a roiling plume of shame in the forefront of his mind. At first, he tried to brush it off, but that only made him feel more guilty. He had been so wrapped up in his own issues that he had left his friend– were they friends?– alone with nothing. He was no different than any other charge of the surgeon's: with cold silence and disregard in return for his efforts.

A familiar voice, clear as a bell and just as lilting nagged at him from behind, and it certainly wasn't Sigg's.

 _Look how self-absorbed we've become._

Something strange happened to Jack then, as he stood there on the fire escape with the railing so tight in his fists that his knuckles turned white. He was suddenly aware of a funny feeling in his chest. Something bitter and needy and familiar; something that felt like it had been there for a long time.

Slowly, Jack leaned over the wrought-iron until he was almost hanging off the fire escape. The pavement stared up at him from four stories away. Not too far, but enough. Inescapable. Mind blank with exhaustion, Jack planted a boot on the rail and hauled himself up. The wind lapped coldly at his sides as he reached up to grab the fifth floor platform. The sun was just breaking the horizon of buildings in the east, and the sky was bright. Pale. He closed his eyes, lulled by the wind in his ears. He was so tired.

Jack let go.

Gravity wrestled at him and Jack's eyes shot open, white fear stunting every nerve ending in his body. The ground spun as he teetered on the railing, looking much farther away than it had a moment before. Jack yelped as he swayed, frantically reeling his arms in the opposite direction as he truly realized what was happening. He lost his balance, finally, crashing back onto the grate with a brassy clang that bounced back at him from the bricks he had been staring at.

 _What... just happened?_

The metal buckled and vibrated under the sudden weight, and Jack lay frozen where he'd landed, as if even his racing heart would cause it to come apart at the bolts. His mouth was open in shock, and his eyes were just as wide. Even long after the rattling had passed, he still didn't budge an inch. Finally, though, he slowly raised himself off of the metal on wobbly elbows. He had landed hard on his knee, but the pain blooming in his bones barely registered in his mind compared with the fact that he had almost fallen to his death.

 _Fallen,_ he thought. _Fallen._

He sat there for a few minutes, catching his breath and watching the white sun climb over some of the lower buildings. A few aircraft were already putting along in between high rises, off to who-knows where. The sounds of the city slowly rose around him, and his heart slowly returned to its normal speed. Sigg timidly reentered Jack's thoughts, and he decided then that he should go and talk, or apologize, or something. He refused to be one of hundreds of footnotes that disappeared from the surgeon's thoughts after they were filed away all nice and neat. He wouldn't– couldn't leave Sigg like he had found him.

Shakily, Jack grabbed the rail and pulled himself to his feet, taking a last look at the dawn. It felt like ages since last night when he had last done this. When he turned to climb back through the window, Jack stopped dead. His blood froze.

The mare was no different than it had been when Jack first started noticing it a few years ago, and it was here now, blocking the entrance with its black, leviathan frame. Everything Sigg had said about hallucinations came flooding into his mind as their eyes met. He could almost feel the mare leaping out of that butterfly-shaped chasm in his head, landing in that damn room. Scaring him. Dry anger pried at his will, but fear and knowing kept him frozen.

The horse stood silent as ever, staring coldly at Jack with its empty eyes that burned like twin coals. Its coat was dull, dark enough to stave off any light that may have caught it and turned it into anything more than a silhouette. The morning sun filtered watery pink through the window and came to a stop just before the beast's hooves. It pawed at the floor with one of them, hoof clacking on the tile– though Jack noticed that it barely left so much as a smudge in the dust– and nickered softly at him. Jack felt nauseous. As it stared him down, though, flicking its tail, he felt the rage coming on. Squaring his shoulders, he turned fully to face the mare. It didn't move.

"You aren't real," Jack muttered. It came out much more hoarse and strained than he meant for it to be, but he took a step forward, setting his jaw. His voice rang out, bouncing off of brick walls.

"You. Are not. Real." Jack leaned down over the window sill, gripping the rotten wood tight despite the shards of glass that bit at his hands. He felt his palms become sticky with blood, and it stung, but he didn't care.

"Go away," he hissed. The mare still stood, undeterred, which only made Jack's anger burn deeper. "Go–" He hauled himself through the window, trembling with rage as he hit the floor. Mildew smell bombarded his senses again as he craned his neck to glare at the horse, which was looming black and mountainous in the shadows. _"–away!"_

To Jack's astonishment, the mare actually took a half a step backwards, taunting him. Indignantly, furiously, Jack took the bait, and planted another foot forward. Dark, victorious joy burned through him like fire. He _could_ make this beast comply.

" _Go away!"_ he screamed, flinging his arms wildly at the mare, who took another tantalizing step backwards. Jack exploded, advancing on the horse. "You aren't real!" He crowed. "You aren't real, you aren't real, you aren't _real!"_ He roared the last word, rearing back on his feet as his anger reached its tempest.

" _I will not be swayed by shadows!_ " Jack lashed out at the beast's stout neck, knowing his fist would sail through empty air. Knowing it would dissipate. Knowing he would wake up. But he didn't.

The mare lurched backward, arching its back and rearing up to a height Jack knew should have propelled it through the ceiling. A whinny like a roar filled up the waiting room and cold fear speared Jack's chest as the beast moved to stab at him with its hooves. He reeled backwards, falling against the windowsill. This time, his movement was quick enough to slice his palms open. This time, he didn't feel anything.

For two years they had been playing this game, and Jack knew he had just broken the rules.

He watched, frozen, as the horse surely would strike him down, or try to, but before it could lash out, it suddenly spun and ran out the far door. The hooves thundering down the hallway matched the thundering of Jack's heart, and something snapped.

Jack pulled himself off the ground and tore away after the mare, heart pounding. He hadn't even realized he had fallen. Numb and enraged, he tore through the open doorway after the horse, which to his shock, was still not going away, cantering down the hallway ahead.

Unlike the previous night, the crumbling hallway was shot through with morning sunlight, not that Jack cared. All he saw was the beast's back disappearing down it. He was in a daze, jumping over god-knows-what, running through god-knows-where. Everything looked so different from last night, and Jack was soon lost in a labyrinth of hallways, caught up in the chase. His heart felt like it was going to burst out of his chest from exhilaration, fury, terror, grief, exhaustion.

He hurtled over a bed that had been half melted by flames long ago, slammed into singed walls, stumbled over toppled IV racks, but still he ran, and the horse never faltered. Other than the deafening knock of hooves on linoleum, the mare made no sound at all. It hadn't opened its mouth when it whinnied at him, and it wasn't breathing, even as it ran.

Jack shot out of a hallway and into a place where several other hallways converged. A huge round desk sat low in the middle, and the horse's eyes flashed wildly as it flanked it, disappearing down another corridor. Jack let out a yell of anger, jumping the edge of the desk and racing after it. He saw it fleeing in the slim windows beyond two steel double doors, though the doors themselves were completely still. Jack rammed into them full on with his shoulder, hissing as stinging heat seared his arm. He had definitely sprained something.

The horse was at the end of the skybridge by then, and Jack finally realized that he had been here before. Peeling black paint blazed the word 'PEDIATRICS' above the far set of doors. One of them was slightly ajar, held open by a buckled frame. Sigg had mentioned something about it when they had passed through the same door the previous night.

Jack blew through this one with ease, whipping past a toppled defibrillator and left, down the hall that had the windows and debris. He leaped over the puddle and frog blanket, not even glancing. The beast was his prey.

Sigg's haunt was near, Jack could tell, although the chemical smell from last night had vanished almost entirely.

 _Wait–!_ he thought, skidding to a stop. Wind lashed at his face from a broken window. Sigg. _Sigg._ Sigg could help this! The din of the mare's hooves was still bouncing around in the hallway, but Jack didn't remember now which way to turn. The rest of the journey had been made in the dark. His heart was pounding. The hallucinations usually wore off by this point, but the sound of the mare cantering through the web of corridors was still ringing in the distance. A ghostly whinny echoed down the hall, grating and thunderous. A bolt of fear sped down Jack's spine, and he cupped his hands around his mouth in panic.

"Sigg!" he yelled, hoping his voice would carry through the empty building. "Sigga!" he thought the galloping would surely have stopped by now, but if anything it sounded like it had changed direction, and it was coming louder and louder down a hallway next to him.

" _Shit!"_ he hissed, charging blindly in the other direction, cold with terror. The mare had _heard_ him. It was _chasing_ him. Hooves hitting like thunderclaps reached him over the hammering of his heart, and he started swinging around the frames of doors trying to run faster, screaming like a madman as he went.

" _Sigg! Sigg! Answer me– help!"_ but there no sound except for hooves and his heart and straining lungs. Silence. A horrible feeling seeped like oil into Jack's heaving chest.

 _He's gone. Oh hell, he's gone for the morning._ Dread and terror slammed into Jack, but still he screamed the surgeon's name, praying on some shred of hope that Sigg hadn't left the building yet. He had just been here! An equine scream shredded the air and Jack glanced over his shoulder, feeling his heart stop in his chest. It was six feet behind. Maybe five. Head bowed, its eyes blazed blankly. Terrified thoughts streaked through his head.

 _I'm dead, I'm dead... I couldn't catch it even when I was running as fast as I could. It can't be real... but it can't not be._

"SIGGA KAJAR!" he screamed hoarsely. His voice echoed back at him from the blank walls and tile floor, mocking. No answer. Doors flanked him on either side, always closed. Always hiding things. This corridor was burned almost completely black. One door at the end stood open, heavy and steel and tarnished by time. Jack burst through it panting. Through all of it, the mare's staccato was still there. Staring dizzily at the cracked tile, Jack finally sunk to his knees. He closed his eyes and shook, waiting for the beast to finish its job.

The sound of it running escalated and escalated until it was just outside the wall, and Jack trembled harder, putting his head in his hands when suddenly, the sound died away.

For a moment Jack just sat there and waited, but the sound had all ceased. Slowly, he cracked open his eyes and allowed himself to look at the tile. It was cracked and dusty like the rest of the building, but nothing stood there. There was something about it... looking at the floor gave him the strange feeling that he had done so before. Finally, he lifted his head... and all his horror drained away.

The window to the technician room stared unmistakably at him through the darkness in the room, but it was completely busted out. Monitors were toppled, glass peppered the floor, and inky blackness sat coldly just inside. Jack was dumbfounded, blinking several times at the sight just to make sure his horse spell hadn't ended and segued into a different episode. He shook his head and stood dizzily, hearing bits of plaster and drywall crackle underfoot.

He stopped right in front of the shattered window, forehead creasing as if he was trying to remember something vital. A strange, catatonic feeling crept over him, and for all that was he couldn't remember when he had last felt it.

Jack tried to shake it, but both it and a horrible dread had come over him like a rising, poisonous tide. He reached out with a trembling hand and ran a finger over a shard of glass. Brief, biting pain prefaced the ribbon of blood, and he was suddenly dizzy. This was _real._ He spun around to make sure he was in the right room, but he knew, horribly, that he was.

The chirping had seemed so omnipresent and inescapable when Jack had been in the imaging lab before. He had thought he hated it, but now the pressing, ghostly silence felt so terrible, so _wrong._ The scanner was still there, but the sight of it made Jack feel like someone was walking over his grave. Huge sections of the thick plastic hull were fragmented and lying around, revealing the inner workings of the machine. Endless cords, coils, and pumps stared at him, as wrong as seeing the inside of a body. The revolving drum inside had come loose from the frame, and was laying on top if the rim of the bore like something dead. The tunnel was bowed in the middle from the weight of it, and the patient table had been pried completely off of its tracks, lying in the floor beside it. A thick layer of dust covered everything, and Jack whipped around, suddenly searching frantically for a part of the room that wasn't also caked in it.

Any panic he had felt otherwise that night diminished like rain in the coldest, deepest ocean. This fear– this _horror_ that was clawing up his back was unlike anything he had ever felt. It felt... it felt like he was in a different time again.

Reality felt suddenly warped and impossible. He spun in a circle, staring at dust and burn marks and ruin that hadn't been there. The monitor on the wall was a lightbox. The shelves where he'd put his clothes were lying in shambles all the way across the room. There was a gaping hole in the far wall, and another in the ceiling above the scanner. Dim light filtered in through them from outside, but the darkness of this place seemed to swallow it up.

 _Sigg went home,_ he thought. _He was just here._ Jack blinked and lit up. Sigg was just _here!_ His mind strained to think of an explanation. This was a big hospital– there had to be more than one imaging room. If he could just catch Sigg, maybe all of this could be sorted out. Dazedly, Jack turned to run out of the destroyed room, only to fall back on his rear in shock.

He had been seeing this horse for almost three years. Not once had it ever had a rider.

The mare had changed; saddled and decked out in full regalia. It looked less wild than before; steadfast, and severe, and somehow even taller, but it was the rider that scared him. It looked like a man, but Jack's gut told him it was something more hollow than that. It didn't feel human, or even like something that once had been. It was broad-shouldered, armored. Its face– if it even possessed one– was concealed by shadows and an antlered helm that made it look devilish and inhuman. Only its hauntingly familiar eyes were visible, all too similar to the horse's. A long spear pointed in his direction, but that wasn't what drew his gaze. Light didn't have to be hitting them for Jack to know exactly what type of blades were strapped to its back. What they were used for. He gasped, a pitiful choked reach for air, and clapped a hand over his waist.

Jack realized with choking dread that this thing that looked like a shadow on the wall felt more real than anything in that hospital had ever been.

 _It's holes._ The thought was a blubbering, pleading wail in his mind. _It's just holes in my head. It isn't real._ The words buzzed over and over in his skull like terrified wasps, even as the horse stepped closer. Even as he scrambled away. Even as mortified tears spilled down his cheeks. Even as his bloody hands stung from dust on the ground that hadn't been there just a few hours ago.

"It isn't real," he whimpered, voice thick with a sob. His back pressed up against the hull of the scanner. _"It isn't real, it isn't real, it isn't real..."_ The Horseman and his mount advanced, though until they were looming directly in front of Jack, and his whispering keened up into panicked blubbering as he buried his face in his hands.

" _It's isn't real! It's isn't real! It's– it's– oh God, please go away!"_ He was shaking so badly he could hear his back hitting the plastic over the roar of blood in his ears. Image after image was flashing through his mind; holes in the walls and holes in his head and magnets and rams and blood and steel and fire. Sigg.

 _Out of my head..._ he thought, delirious with fear as the Horseman suddenly ceased his advance. _Out of my head..._

 _You– a legend, coming to me for help._

 _My_ clients _call me Sigg._

 _The ice last winter froze out the breakers..._

 _Subject age approx. 304 mo._

 _I'm sorry too._

 _I don't think an eye test is what you need._

 _You ruined my life!_

 _Everything would just... stop._

 _How the mighty fall, huh?_

Jack had his hands over his eyes by now, hunched in on himself against the destroyed scanner. A breathy nicker wheezed in front of him, and Jack barely peeked through his trembling fingers. His heart was thundering. His head hurt. He was almost too hysterical to hear the voice that grated like iron being dragged heavy and cold toward him on the floor.

" _How the mighty fall."_

 **A/N:** watch?v=kdhhQhqi_AE

Sooooo, anyone here seen A Beautiful Mind? *nervous laughter* (this took so long to write lord have mercy) I want to know just how many times I've written the words 'Jack blinked' so far. I bet the number is staggering, I swear (Note: I checked. It's twenty-one).

If you're reading on , I'm sorry I didn't know the horizontal lines didn't work :0 but it's a hassle to edit a past chapter so I'll probably just leave it.

Well, from here on out I have officially run out of rough draft, so uh, be afraid. My friends were telling me to put my Spanish teacher in this fic somehow, so.. Profe Siggs dice: "¡Eres esquizofrénico!" (Now let's hope Mrs. Briggs never sees this lol). I also discovered how huge the spaces in between the paragraphs were, so I fixed that. (Good lord, could I say 'so' again, please?) I snuck in the tiniest hint to Blue Jack(? did the fandom ever decide on a better name for him because there is no way to make it sound less goofy) and also a reference or two to the Plague Dogs, which I love to connect to Samurai Jack because it's another good story about lost souls and craziness and just bleak situations in general. Annnd I would also be lying if I said I didn't base the fire escape thing off of that one scene from Forrest Gump where Jenny almost unknowingly throws herself from the balcony of a high rise. I had a lot of fun writing this one, that's for sure. For kicks I put every chapter so far into one OpenOffice document and put in in book mode and it was over fifty pages. _Fifty._ And it isn't even done yet. This chapter alone added like 27 to that mix, so there's that I guess– I'll have a full fledged book by the time this is done lol

I've been noticing when I go back to AO3 to get refs on previous chapters (it's quicker than digging through my documents, that's for sure), there are like, a ton of typos and little grammatical things even in the author's notes I never noticed. Maybe using 10-point font in OpenOffice isn't a very wise decision but I'm too lazy to edit them out ( ´_ﾉ`) I also reread some of chapter one and already I want to just completely rewrite it, lord. There are so many little irritating things I want to straighten up but lord knows that would take another eighty years. As I was on the bus for a choir thing I was writing this and sure enough I look up to see a great big flashing hostpital sign that said 'CT & MRI DONE HERE.' Ohh the irony.

Dude y'all wouldn't believe how much I ended up researching stuff about MRI scanners like I watched one video and next thing I know I have like 15 videos about MRIs on my YouTube history. I added the thing about how the bore revolved like a catscan because I think it would make sense for even familiar technology to be a little different in the alternate timeline. Seriously, though if you've never heard one they're **crazy** like no wonder Jack would freak out they sound like a semitruck in a blender.

watch?v=6Aj2QspPf7s


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